


Awaiting Time

by Beshter



Series: Timeless [3]
Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-18 04:01:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 81,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28736910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beshter/pseuds/Beshter
Summary: Sequel to "Time and Again" and "Out of Time". After sixty-six years - or six, depending on how she looks at it - Peggy Carter has finally found Steve Rogers. As she awaits his recovery, however, the rest of the world keeps moving, including a fight that might threaten the Avengers just at a moment Peggy knows they will be needed most - if only she can prove the threat that is looming.
Relationships: Peggy Carter & Phil Coulson, Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Pepper Potts/Tony Stark
Series: Timeless [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1710199
Comments: 326
Kudos: 276





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to "Awaiting Time", the next installment in the "Timeless" series. This is the sequel to "Time and Again" and "Out of Time" both of which I hope you get a chance to read. Yes, we have finally found Steve. He's going to wake up to a whole different world - and a whole different Peggy! But while she's managing that, there are other things going on, as usual, and I am glad Peggy is a multitasker.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has read and commented on the other two - I do appreciate your feedback so very, very much. I felt I needed to say that to express my appreciation, and I hope you keep reading and liking. I write these stories more to amuse myself and keep me entertained, especially right now, but the fact that you have enjoyed them too warms my heart. Thank you.

When Peggy Carter had joined the Special Operations Executive she had prepared herself for intrigue, danger, even the threat of imminent death. She had expected she would be sent as an operative undercover to somewhere like France or the Netherlands, living there as a spy, always in danger of being uncovered by the German SS, to be in situations that would require her cunning and wit to outthink and outmaneuver the other side. What she hadn’t prepared herself for, however, was the likes of the average American GI...or mosquitos that could carry off small children...or New Jersey, as a matter of fact.

She supposed that, on the whole, it wasn’t horrible. Camp Lehigh was a small army facility, really only designed for the training of troops. It had been built in the run up to the last war, when the United States had been trying to ramp up its meager forces to enter the effort. Frankly, it showed. Most of the buildings were white clapboard, thrown together in the sort of rushed, slap-dash fashion that said they were built for functionality, not for either comfort or longevity. The only reason it had remained active at all in the twenty years since was that it served as a training station for new recruits into the army, and then only for rather small numbers. It was what it was always meant to be, a temporary way station for those who could cut it in ‘this man’s army’ and nothing else. No frills, no comforts...not even much in the way of privacy.

That, Peggy had unfortunately figured out when she engaged in her evening run.

As it turned out this night she would have to deal with an even more idiotic than usual crowd. The latest batch of recruits for Dr. Erskine’s miracle formula had proven to be subpar, in Peggy’s opinion, no less because they were being led by a loud-mouth lunkhead by the name of Gilmore Hodge. He was a brash idiot who she guessed was from somewhere in New York and had the IQ of a fruit bat. He certainly didn’t know how rank in the Army worked or how to treat a superior officer, whatever their gender may be, and she wasn’t sure he could even spell manners. She had seen his type before, of course. It seemed that no matter if the recruits were from New York or the Midwest every area of this country had one - not too bright, not too aware, certainly lacking any and all sense of self preservation, who felt that because she was a female in uniform that gave them free license to treat her however they wished. Few of them had ever been so brash or stupid as to do it in front of everyone, only to willingly allow their face to be bashed in for their troubles. Peggy couldn’t decide if Hodge was just particularly entitled or particularly ignorant, she suspected a combination of the two, but she had taken particular delight in felling him like a giant tree, only to compound that feeling when Phillips had eyed the hapless private on the ground with a baleful eye, brooking no complaint from him.

Despite that set down, however, one which would have stopped most other men from daring to be openly impudent, Hodge had simply decided to change his tactics. If he couldn’t bully or harass the lady into giving him the attention he so craved, well, he would just linger, like a bad odor, shooting her what she assumed he thought were flirtatious grins - he frankly looked as if he were in pain - and she swore she thought he batted his eyes...batted his eyes! Like a silly debutante at her first ball! Irritation more than anything had sent her out of the mess early, frustration driving her to do something. So she had changed her clothes and began a jog, then a run through the deliberately uneven and sandy terrain of Camp Lehigh.

Summer was at its thickest, and though the sun was setting, the air was still heavy and sticky, but she plowed on around the paths that cut through the woods surrounding the camp. She had just finished her first circuit, rounding the corner to the main area, where, as luck would have it, the unfortunate private was there with several cronies, smoking and laughing and enjoying their only downtime for the evening. Peggy had hoped to avoid them, but as luck would have it, the sandy path ran right in front of where they lounged, obviously drawing their attention to her. Pretending to ignore them, she continued on, surreptitiously eyeing the three who had all stopped to stare at her brazenly as she pounded up the path, sweaty, red-faced, and blown, hardly her best look. That didn’t seem to bother this lot, who all ogled her as if she were a prime piece of meat, though with varying degrees of obviousness. Hodge clearly had no qualms about doing so openly, his wide mouth leering as she came up the bath, before loosing an appreciative wolf whistle, the type Peggy had never heard in England but which she’d had directed at her hundreds of times now on American shores. She had come to hate it.

“Hey, fellas, look who’s come to grace us! It’s the Queen herself!” He pushed himself off of a gate post, swaggering down the grassy incline to the path Peggy was on. "Glad you could deign to be with us, your majesty!”

Peggy slowed, wiping sweat off her forehead with the back of one arm, sizing up Hodge as she did so. “You do impress me, Hodge. I wasn’t sure you know the word ‘deign’ at all.”

One of his cronies snorted, earning a glare from Hodge, who shrugged his broad shoulders in his affronted dignity. “I know lots of things, like the fact I’m kind of a nice guy. Which makes me wonder why you gotta be all rude to me?”

Peggy sighed, shaking her head. To some men, the very idea of a woman being anything other than an object for their desire seemed to baffle them. Certainly, many struggled with the idea that a woman could just simply not be interested in them. As for the idea that a woman could be an equal to them, even a superior, it did not compute. Hodge was clearly one of them.

“Private, I apologize if it seems that I have been rude, however, I doubt I am the first woman who has been or will be, at least in your narrow definition of it. You may start by learning that I hold an officers rank here with the SSR and you should remember that before I have you thrown in the brig for insubordination, something I doubt will earn you high marks with Colonel Phillips or Dr. Erskine for this program. If you value both your freedom and your place, you’ll kindly remember that”

With that, she turned heel, determined to start her exercise again, but alas, Hodge had other ideas. Before she could even take a step his hand shot out for her wrist, not tightly, but enough to stall her, and enough to indicate how unhappy he was with her words. Without pause, without thinking, Peggy wrapped her fingers around his wrist, spun back to grab the same forearm with her right hand, and swung both up over her right shoulder, sinking down enough to leverage his weight and height into a flip over her head. Hodge didn’t even have the chance to react before he was flying, landing hard on the ground on his back in front of her, the wind knocked out of him as he stared up at her, stunned. His two friends gasped and cursed at the display, but Peggy ignored them as she used her continued grip on Hodge’s arm to flip him to his side, bending it painfully as he yelped and hollered, her knee planting itself firmly into his lower back, forcing him to arch backwards, pulling at the twisted arm even more.

“Now, Private,” she began, conversationally, “let’s have a bit of a chat about how you apologize for your rudeness just now and I am gracious enough to let that go in light of your general ignorance and overall boorish behavior, a trait I don’t believe you will be continuing in the SSR. Do we understand each other?”

He coughed and spat into the dirt, struggling, but it was no use at this point, Peggy only tightened his arm more and he squealed, finally giving in to her question. “Yeah, yeah, I understand. I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”

“Good! From now on I better be greeted as befits my rank and there will be no other further attempts to accost or manhandle me, nor will there be snide comments, else I will have you running non-stop to Atlantic City and back - with or without boots.”

She wasn’t sure that Hodge even knew where Atlantic City was in relation to Camp Lehigh, but he nodded, clearly understanding his predicament. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Very well.” She released his arm, moving to allow the man to scramble up, covered in sandy dirt, his pride and arm likely wounded, but all recoverable. He turned, glaring at her, but also clearly aware she could handle the likes of someone like him. He glanced at his two friends, both of whom looked as if they were trying very hard not to laugh and failing abysmally, and sketched the briefest of salutes before charging back up the rise to the white, clapboard builds, his friends traipsing more slowly and amusedly behind.

Well...hopefully that took care of that.

Adrenaline, anger, and irritation coursing through her, Peggy channeled it instead towards picking up her feet once again. This moment of the day was the only quiet, peaceful, free time she had to herself, the only time she could divorce herself from the trials of the day, be they Gilmore Hodge or Howard Stark’s concerns on whether or not he could make his Vita Ray chamber functional without blowing out the entire New York City power grid. She could just focus, instead, on each breath, each step, the pounding of her pulse and the air in her lungs.

Three more times she rounded the uneven, rough track that encircled the camp and its environs, till her lungs burned, her legs itched with the tingling blood running through them, and her throat hurt from the gasps of air she was taking. Exhausted and covered in sweat, she threw herself on the grassy rise where she had caught Hodge earlier, watching the summer sky above her turn from the oranges and yellows of sunset to the pale, pearly creams, soft and gentle blues, and dark lavenders of twilight. The stands of trees surrounding the camp rustled with the incoming breeze, drying some of the worst of the sweat off, but leaving her skin now itchy, grass and dirt sticking to it. Still, it felt nice, alone in the quiet, the sound of cicadas in the distance and...leather slapping?

Peggy peeked her head up over the knoll, looking to see who might be out there working at a bag at this time of the evening. Seeing as it was a training facility, hand-to-hand combat was common, and during the day there were all sorts of sessions going, often ones involving the punching bag, but during the evenings most of the soldiers wandered off to their bunks to have some R&R before dark and the early 6 AM reveille that would wake them all up to do it again. Still, she supposed perhaps someone with something on their mind might have wandered out to one of the bags to work out on it. She shrugged, lazily considering that she had sat out in the growing darkness long enough, and pulled herself up to trudge back to the barracks she shared with the other ladies working at the camp and a nice hot shower before bed herself.

Peggy had just crested the small rise when she caught sight of one of the tall, large leather bags filled with sand tied to one of the trees near the training area. At first she could see no one there, blocked by the bag which bounced and jiggled without much movement. Finally, in the waning light, she could just catch the slight form of one of the new recruits...Richards...Roberts….Rogers, that was his name...his hands encased in gloves that looked oversized on him, punching at the bag with what she surmised was all his might, which in fairness wasn’t much. His arms under his oversized undershirt looked as thin as toothpicks. She’d done the work up of him earlier in the clinic and for the life of her she couldn’t understand why Erskine had sent this one over. He had a list of medical conditions a mile long, any one of them would have had him declared 4F under the American military system, and that wasn’t including the things like rheumatic fever that he had somehow managed to survive. In every category he was at the bottom of the metrics; he was shorter than even she was and underweight on top of it. Everything about the poor man said that he should be sent back home or at the very least given a desk job somewhere stateside where he could still help the war effort out but not be either under the weather or underfoot.

But here he was at dusk, punching a bag, as if he could somehow move it by sheer force of will.

Peggy’s skin itched and was begging for a shower, but on impulse she decided to wander to where the private was working, watching him for long moments in the lengthening shadows. His form wasn’t awful. He had a good stance, his jabs were nice and tight, and there was a certain gracefulness to it all that seemed natural. Still, the lack of height or weight, not to mention muscle tone itself, meant he wasn’t getting anywhere with the bag. It swayed, but didn’t move much, no matter how fast his jabs or how hard he gave them. After several long moments, he paused, breathless, wheezing hard as he grabbed the mostly still bag, holding on to it for long moments as he caught his breath.

Peggy could have walked away then, left the private to it, but she found herself speaking up more out of curiosity than anything. “Who taught you how to fight?”

The man, Rogers, whipped around at the bag, eyes wide in shock, surprise and perhaps a hint of embarrassment. Even in the growing shadows she could seek his pale cheeks flame as he let his arms drop, standing awkwardly in front of the punching bag, gapping at her as if he were a landed fish. She had caught him unaware, she supposed, and perhaps for him, like Peggy when she was running, this was his quiet time to be inside his own head for a bit.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized quickly, feeling bad for startling him. “Just...I happened to catch you at. Was out for a bit of exercise myself.”

He nodded, gasping for a moment, turning his gaze to the track she had been on. “I saw you out there. I mean…” He paused, fumbling for words, one of his gloved hands working in a gesture that seemed to indicate that he wanted to clarify that previous statement. “I mean, I wasn’t staring at you or following you or anything, because that would be...ungentlemanly.”

“Ungentlemanly?” That was not an adverb she had expected anyone at this camp to use, certainly not after Hodge’s performance.

“Errr...uncouth?” He looked as if he were strangling on a thesaurus, grasping for different words to explain himself.

“Are you trying to use more eloquent words because I’m British?”

He flushed again, nearly a deep purple this time. “Maybe...I don’t know. I figured saying that I didn’t want to be a creep might not translate well.”

She knew from his paperwork that he, much like Hodge, was from the New York City area. Still, it was clear he wasn’t a total idiot like Hodge, and unlike his fellow private, he at least was courteous. She took pity on him as she smiled, crossing her arms as she nodded to the bag. “I am assuming you came out for a bit of a think, quiet from the rest of everything.”

“Yeah,” he nodded, looking relieved that he didn’t have to come up with more words for not being an ass. “Just...working on the fundamentals, you know...for what it’s worth.”

The small frown and the self-deprecating note in his voice underscored the fact that he was well aware of what his deficiencies were. Peggy supposed he would have to be, given the number of times Erskine said he had tried to enlist in the army and had been rejected. He also clearly understood what others saw when they looked at him; a man who was too small, too scrawny, too sickly, too unable to fight. Even so, there he was at a punching bag, oversized gloves over his hands, jabbing at the bag with speed and precision, if not precisely doing any damage to it. There was at least something there to work with, there.

“Who taught you,” she reiterated her question from earlier, curious, nodding to the bag. “Your form isn’t horrible, which is why I ask. Obviously, you’ve picked up a thing or two along the way.”

A lopsided smile quirked his narrow face. “Uhh...my best friend, actually. He worked part time at a boxing gym back home. He used to try and teach me things so I could defend myself.”

He didn’t say it, and she doubted he would to a stranger, but she guessed he likely had to defend himself quite a bit. He was small and easy prey to the likes of the Gilmore Hodges of the world, something Peggy could relate to, having just had to fight off his predatory nature. Still, despite the fact he looked as if a stiff wind would blow him away if it caught him right, he was still standing out here in the twilight, punching a bag that weighed much more than him, standing with his two feet planted and refusing to let it move him. There was something admirable about that.

“Your name is Rogers, isn’t it?”

He perked up at that, a hint of a brilliant smile peeking up at the corners of his mouth. “You remembered?”

Peggy didn’t want to admit she did have trouble remembering it earlier. “Well, hard not to forget, given the drill sergeant kept screaming it. I own to a bit of mild surprise that you are here.”

That earned a reaction. The smile faded as something hard and piercing formed, his thin jaw pitching forward revealing a willfulness Peggy wouldn’t have expected. “Why shouldn’t I be here?”

Perhaps, had the stakes been different, she might have been embarrassed, stammered out an apology, and said something soothing to try and smooth the poor man’s feathers, but she found herself leaning into honesty instead. “You aren’t the typical physical specimen that the colonel is looking for in Project: Rebirth. The idea is that we will be taking one of you to the peak of your physical capability, and even then the process itself is arduous and taxing and we don't know if it the subject will even survive. What’s more, it will be the first time it will be tried on an American subject, and we won’t know the reaction. All that to say, Private Rogers, it will take a lot to make it through to that end point.”

If her words deterred him, he didn’t show it. If anything, he only looked more determined...and mutinous. “I know. I get it, it may not work and they may not even take me, but I’m not asking for favors or even shortcuts. I’m here to have a chance to defend my country and stop what’s going on, and even if I don’t get picked I can’t say I didn’t try.”

His words, so passionately spoken, gave Peggy pause, tugging at those parts of her that knew all too well what it was like to want to be given a chance, any chance, and have someone believe in her. To think she had almost thrown it all away because she believed that as a woman she couldn’t fight. Had Michael not given her that push, she wouldn’t have had the strength to take off Fred’s engagement ring and walk into the Baker Street offices to present herself. For better or worse it ended up with her here in New Jersey. Erskine had believed in this Rogers fellow, had given him a push to Camp Lehigh. Where would it end up taking him?

“Well, then, Private Rogers, I will wish you best of luck. Don’t stay up too late, reveille is always too early.” She paused to eye first him, then the bag, before cocking her expression back to him. “Also, you tend to drop your shoulder with your right. Keep it up, else you telegraph your intentions to your enemies.”

He shrugged his broad, bony shoulder, as if mentally committing that with the physical action of rolling it. “Yeah, Bucky was alway saying the same thing. Thank you for the advice, Agent Carter.”

Unlike Hodge, he had at least remembered her name. “Good night, Private.”

She turned to make her way back to the barracks and scrub off the filth of her run when his voice called out behind her. “You don’t think I can make it, do you?”

There was a chip on his shoulder, then! It surprised her enough to turn and regard him, even if she just kept walking backwards. “You may surprise me, Rogers. I look forward to you proving me wrong.”

Judging from the determined set to his expression as she waved, he just might do it. He might just prove all of them wrong in the end.

“I do look forward to seeing that,” she murmured to herself, her attention shifting to her longed for shower as behind her the soft _thwapping_ sound of Rogers trying to weakly pummel a leather punching bag sounded in the thick, humid air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much love to New Jersey! I don't hate you! My father's maternal family, from my Mommom on up, were native to the Hammonton/Mill Valley/South Jersey area, so I do love NJ despite Peggy's quip. While I didn't grow up there, I do have a warm spot in my heart for it (even if I do enjoy how "Hamilton" does make fun of it a little bit - it is all in love).


	2. Chapter 2

It had been cold the night Peggy Carter had taken Scott Lang’s hand and fallen down a rabbit hole that had accidentally deposited her in the year 2010. 

She had not exactly been in the best frame of mind that evening, to be fair. She had just turned down a perfectly kind and lovely marriage proposal from Daniel Sousa, a man whom she had counted dear, primarily because her heart wasn’t in it. She had wandered in the snow, desolate and kicking herself, and along had come a man insisting he was from the future, that he had been come to find her because horrible things would happen if she didn’t come with him and attempt to fix the Avengers, whoever they were, and stop someone named Thanos from killing off half of all existence. It all had sounded mad, frankly, sitting in that diner with him as he had mooned over a pie and told her this ridiculous story, and she had thought about walking away from him, to go into the cold and the dark and return to her snug apartment and continue to feel sorry for herself for hurting Daniel. She nearly did so...at least until he dropped the name of Steve Rogers.

And then Peggy had listened.

To be fair, she didn’t precisely agree to Lang’s scheme even when he did confess that in his timeline Steve had been found in the ice and brought back to life, that he was alive and well in Lang’s future. Rather, she had wanted to jump up, get Howard Stark and find Steve herself, to bring him back to 1949. It was Lang’s heartfelt plea that stopped her, a father’s grief and anguish over the everything his daughter had suffered in this Thanos’ deadly snap. Peggy didn’t know the details, she didn’t need to, she just knew that in a crucial moment when these Avengers were needed, they failed because its two leading members were locked in a bitter fued. And if there was something Peggy did know how to do, it was knowing how to push people to do the right thing. And so she agreed to come forward in time, knowing that half of this insane plan would require the brilliance and intellect of Howard’s son, Tony. The other half lay sleeping in the ice off the Canadian coast.

And now, after so many years, Peggy would finally have a chance to wake him up.

“Hey, how are you holding up?” Her great-niece, Sharon, touched her hand, catching Peggy’s attention as she stared at nothing in particular, lost in the depths of her own thoughts.

“Fine,” Peggy lied, the automatic response to any situation, one she’d honed through both bombs and bullets. Never mind the fact that her heart hadn’t stopped racing since the moment Maria Hill had called her, nor had her stomach stopped churning with nerves and uncertainty.

That said, Sharon was Peggy’s brother’s granddaughter, and much like Michael, she could tell when Peggy was bluffing easily enough. “It’s okay to be not okay, you know.”

Peggy wasn’t so sure she had ever known a moment in her life when she was ever allowed to just fall apart and she wasn’t sure she precisely knew how. Still, she was grateful Sharon was there to keep her grounded, which was why she had called her of all the people she knew to come with her. “Thank you.”

“I imagine this has got to be nerve wracking, even if you have been looking for him. Did they say anything about the site?”

“Not particularly. Stark was there with me and I don’t even know if Hill knew the details. All she said was that she was having a quinjet prepped for me and I asked if they could get you up to New York to come with me.”

“And here I thought you just wanted more of Mom’s pie,” Sharon teased, lightly.

“Did you happen to bring some,” Peggy replied, not that she could have eaten a bite. As it was her hands trembled every time she unknotted them in her lap.

“You know the boys, they got the rest.”

“Pity, I could have given some to Jake for flying us up here.” Peggy knew precious little about the pilot who had taken to being Peggy’s primary pilot on call, save that he had served in the military and that his father was well known in journalism circles, though he mentioned this latter with the sort of rueful smile that suggested it wasn’t for good reasons. It struck her, then, how little she did know about the man and how short sighted that was of her.

As if hearing his name invoked, Jake called from the front cockpit, his voice carrying in the white noise of the main cabin. “Five minutes till landing, Director. They said they have a secure landing spot for us on the glacier, but they do warn it is subzero temperatures. You and Agent Carter geared up for that?”

“We’re all set,” Sharon assured him, nodding to the large duffles strapped into a cargo area further into the cabin. “Hill sent me up with Arctic weather gear.”

Peggy nodded, unsurprised that the efficient, no-nonsense Maria Hill would remember to send gear for Arctic Canada. Peggy’s scattered brain hadn’t even considered it. “She said the Canadians have set up a base there all under the guise of finding a downed weather balloon in order to hide the military and SHIELD activity in the area.”

“Which means it won’t be the Ritz, but it is better than trying to camp out on a sheet of ice in the dead of winter.” Sharon wrinkled her nose, injecting a bit of levity. “I own I’m a wuss when it comes down to it. I don’t like it, but I’ll do it.”

Despite her strung out nerves, Peggy found it somewhere within her to chuckle at that. “For my sake?”

“Well, sure. Also, I did do my survival training, it’s not like I couldn’t.” Sharon shrugged, rolling her large, dark Carter eyes. “I mean, I’m a SHIELD operative, what do you take me for?”

That did make Peggy laugh. “I won’t lie, I was never fond of it. First time I ever had to kip in the snow was with the Howling Commandos somewhere in the mountains, and I shivered so hard I didn’t sleep a wink. I never thought I would be warm ever again.”

The memory was uncomfortably fresh when she thought about it. For her it had only been a few years, the war over but not as distant of a memory as it would be to the few others of that generation still alive. She had cursed being stuck in the mountains of northern Italy with that lot, her teeth constantly chattering, her toes always cold. The only one who seemed to manage was Steve, who had earned the not-so-quiet curses of his commandos and Peggy, particularly when he forgot that his metabolism ran so high that he didn’t feel the cold like they did. Barnes only just did stop a mutiny, and that mostly by a well aimed snowball to the side of Steve’s head, hitting him in the ear with pinpoint precision, enough to gain Steve’s annoyance and attention. It was only then that he agreed to build up a fire to camp for the night, but even then he had stayed on the fringes of their camp, Peggy suspected to allow the rest of them a chance to huddle near the meager flames and warm themselves.

Sharon hummed thoughtfully, eyeing Peggy with her pointed look. “I know after two years I should be used to you just dropping old war stories like they were nothing, but you know...it’s still weird.”

Peggy could only laugh at the absurdity of it all. Were she in Sharon’s shoes, she would probably say the same thing. No one on earth could relate to the strangeness of Peggy’s existence, the weird straddling of two worlds, of two times, of two existences...that is, no one else in the world could understand it till now. What a world Steve was going to wake to.

“Ladies, if you wouldn’t mind strapping in, we’ll be making our decent.” Jake’s polite order had them both clicking their harnesses in as the quinjet made its vertical landing into the darkness of the Arctic winter. Peggy held her breath, knuckles white and straining as she stared out of the front window, the world utter darkness save for the scattering of snowflakes flurrying through the light of the quinjet.

Jake landed them with nary a bump. “We’ve touched down. The temperature is -30 out there, so I’d suggest suiting up in here before you head out. I’ve got to prep this baby for the temps, but I’ll be in when I’m done.”

“Right,” Sharon called, unbuckling her harness and smiling at Peggy. “You ready for this?”

Peggy thought it was a bit too late to say no. “As I will ever be.”

To be honest, she wasn’t sure she ever would be, not to see the place where Steve had crashed. It didn’t matter that intellectually she knew that he was alive in there, protected by the serum in his veins, she had been on the line, speaking to him as he stared down this glacier and had pointed the _Valkyrie’s_ nose towards it in the hope of saving the world.

_Peggy...I got to put her in the water…_

“Peggy!”

“Yeah,” she snapped her attention to Sharon holding out one of the kit bags. She took it gratefully, pulling out the specially heated thermal suits, trying not to think of Howard’s awful vest, the one that had meant the death of Chief Dooley. Sharon didn’t seem overly concerned as she slipped on the dark overpants over her standard issue utility suit, not dissimilar from Romanoff’s. Peggy, not being a field operative, was in less form fitting clothes, but she managed to pull on the insulated pants over her own sensible clothes, finding that they did indeed warm up toastily, as did the insulated boots that she slipped on next.

“Where were these when I was in the Alps in winter,” she groused as she slipped the coat on, a large, puffy thing, with a similar interior heating unit and a hood trimmed in synthetic fur.

“See, the future does have its benefits,” Sharon teased, zipping up her jacket and pulling on the heavy duty balaclava over her head and face.

“Global communications, quinjets, heat up suits. Pity that American’s still can’t make a good cup of tea.”

Sharon snorted but didn’t reply as she adjusted her mask and then slipped on her mittens. When the ensemble was finished she waited as Peggy finished kitting herself out, passing her own rucksack, the same trusty one Peggy had brought through the war and from 1949. “Whatever is out there, Peg, I’m here for you. We’re here for you, your family.”

“I know,” she nodded, her voice muffled behind swaths of synthetic knit. “It will be okay, I know it.”

For the first time she saw a hint of worry and perhaps a bit of doubt in her niece’s eyes. Peggy couldn’t blame her. The only thing more unbelievable than Peggy’s appearance in this world have six decades was the possibility of finding Steve Rogers alive under the ice after nearly that same amount of time. Honestly, Peggy might not have believed it herself, if she hadn’t bought into Scott Lang’s story. Lang had brought her this far. She doubted he was wrong in this..

“Let’s go,” she breathed, reaching for the gangplank and pushing the button for it to open.

It wasn’t just freezing...it was mind-numbingly cold. It was the sort of cold that stole your breath and made your eyes water. Even with the protective layers and heated thermals, Peggy could feel her lungs seizing with the cold, her lashes freezing as her mittened fingers gripped the straps of her rucksack. Clumsily in her thick books, she stepped down the gangplank and into the soft, powdery snow overlaying layers of thick, crunching ice.

This is where Steve had been? For all this time?

Waiting...and likely shivering...at the end of the gangplank were a cluster of huddled and swathed figures, all with flashlights. Whether they were male or female, she had no way of knowing, but she stopped in front of them, holding out a hand in front of her to the one who stood in the middle and seem to be taking charge. “Director Peggy Carter, I’m here with Agent Sharon Carter.”

“Agent Zimmer, Director.” The gloved hand that took hers seemed to be that of a man. “This is Agent Emmerson, also SHIELD. And here is Colonel Montgomery from the Royal Canadian Air Force and Lieutenant Colonel Cramer from Thule AFB in Greenland. They have been providing support to our teams here.”

Peggy could do little more than nod, the wind and wicked cold stealing her voice. Sharon beside her managed to shiver out “Could we get somewhere warm?”

“Of course!” The bundle that had been introduced as Montgomery waved a hand to a compound that looked, not dissimilarly, to a SHIELD compound that they had erected in New Mexico months ago, all surrounding a hammer. Peggy’s one hope was that it was heated. Despite the ghostly glow of the white/blue lights on the site, she stepped carefully along the path created on the ice and snow. She could honestly say she didn’t think she had been on a glacier before and she prayed her feet stayed beneath her and she kept some modicum of dignity.

A door opened and a blast of heat greeted her as she stomped inside, her eyes and nose streaming at the temperature change. The antechamber they stepped into was filled with wet slush as people stomped off snow and moved to remove coats and gloves. Faces began to emerge out of the swaths of coats, and the one she guessed was Zimmer smiled politely as he motioned her to follow him through a maze of narrow, hastily constructed hallways, all at least blessedly warmer than outside.

“The minute we called Fury about this, he said to bring you in,” Zimmer called back over his shoulder as he led her to what looked like some sort of strategic conference room. “Glad you could make it up.”

“As if I would miss it,” Peggy replied, wondering just how much about her the agent knew. She fell into what was familiar, the cadence of a situation that needed handling. “What do we have here?”

Zimmer waved her and Sharon to seats, as Montgomery, Cramer and Emmerson got themselves situated. Another agent wandered in, bringing with them a cart of hot coffees, curls of steam so inviting Peggy almost wanted to plunge into it to rid herself of the awful, breathtaking cold. Sharon, who settled beside her, grabbed one of the paper cups gratefully, not even bothering with cream or sugar, drinking greedily as she shivered.

“Let’s start from the beginning.” Zimmer was a man in his middle years with the look of a seasoned agent. He glanced at Montgomery, who was clearly preparing himself as if to give a standard military report. Small, lean and rangy, the Canadian officer nodded, all business as he did the usual set up that Peggy was well used to now of opening computer files to project on screens. It was methodical and usual, and somewhere, deep under the ice here, Steve lay, comatose. The mundanity of all of this left Peggy internally screaming, but she bit that off as she wrapped her hands around the cup of hot coffee, a touchpoint that at least kept her from snapping.

“Approximately two weeks ago, a Russian oil tanker in international waters caught sight of what they presumed was an old wreck.” Montgomery, clearly a by-the-book sort of military type, thorough and maddeningly informative officer, threw up a wide shot of the glacier they were currently sitting on up on the screen. “They thought at first it was a fishing vessel, given the size, so they contacted the Coast Guard who in turn contacted the RCAF. We had a team out here in 48 hours from contact comprised of a joint Canadian/Greenland/Danish team to look into the wreck. At the time, we weren’t sure what it was. It was only when we had the geologists looking into it that they realized just how big it was.”

Another infernal slide popped up, much to Peggy's chagrin, one that appeared to be some sort of technological scan of what was buried beneath the ice and snow around them. “After some initial scans and readings, and knowing that SHIELD was looking for something this size, that’s when we called in you all.”

“Director Fury sent Emmerson and I up a week ago,” Zimmer explained, jumping into Montgomery’s story. “We were able to get inside. We suspected it was the _Valkyrie_ but had no proof, not till we went in and saw the shield.”

And time stopped for Peggy.

Of course...his shield. It would have been with him, he would have had it near him…

“Just his shield," Sharon pipped up in Peggy’s long silence, perhaps sensing the swell of emotions growing in Peggy’s already addled brain, “what about Captain Rogers?”

Montgomery took up the threads yet again, producing a red-tipped pointer, the sort that shot a beam of light, towards the projection itself. “Judging from what we know of the _Valkyrie’s_ final descent, Captain Rogers had intended to ground it. I’m guessing he pointed it nose downwards in a rather direct dive.”

With unfocused eyes, Peggy studied the scan of the ship, the way it was seated in the ice. She’d listened as he had sent this massive airship into its fall that would crash it into the ice. She had sat on the other end of the line, begging him not to do this. He had been so determined…

“When the aircraft landed, it crashed near here on the glacier,” Montgomery continued, his light circling the very edge of the glacier, hanging out over the sea, where even now it looked as if a large gouge had been taken out of it's top compared to the area surrounding it. “He then skidded across the surface, the nose becoming more and more buried under ice as it scraped off the topmost layer. The additional weight of scraped up snow and ice would have made the front end top heavy, and that combined with the heat of the Valkyrie’s engines would have melted just enough snow near the front end to weaken the support under it and allow it to tip nose first into a crevice that formed at the end of the crash. This coupled with snow melt from the crash itself, it was buried, nose first and sideways in the ice. This explains why it’s sitting at such an odd angle.”

Peggy nodded, but frankly couldn’t care less why it was sitting at such an odd angle, only that Steve was in it, somewhere, deep in the ice. “Is this somehow hampering your efforts to get to Captain Rogers?”

Montgomery looked to Zimmer who finally nodded. “In a word, yes. He’s buried underneath a solid block of ice and snow, and all the weight of the plane itself is being held up there. We will get him out, but it’s going to take a bit longer than just digging him out of the ship.”

But he was there...he was there and they were going to get to him.

Montgomery interceded again, clearly the one logistically managing the site. “The biggest worry is the craft itself. We are working with a team out of Qaanaaq, Greenland to get engineers and equipment from the Royal Danish Air Force out here to assist. Essentially, we will attempt to stabilize the ship itself so it doesn’t threaten to slide down any further and collapse. Once that is done, I’ve already got a team from Thule AFB out to help with bomb removal extraction.”

“Bomb removal,” Sharon yelped, lightly, beside her. Peggy’s heart clenched at that, the memory of Steve’s broken words on the other end of the static line.

“The Valkyrie was fully loaded with weapons enough to blow the entire eastern seaboard of the United States to kingdom come,” Peggy spoke up, remembering all too well that intelligence report, the intel from Armin Zola himself, "it was why Captain Rogers crashed it, the locations had been fixed and he couldn’t undo that. Millions would have been killed had Schmidt’s plan not been stopped.”

If Steve hadn’t sacrificed himself for all of them.

Montgomery nodded in agreement to Peggy’s assessment, unaware she had been the one to prepare the situation report for the Howling Commandos in the first place. “From what SHIELD provided on the weapons the Valkyrie was armed with, they were state of the art in 1945, but after nearly seventy years in extreme conditions they could be unstable. Once we’ve removed them from onboard, we can see if we can get Captain Roger’s remains out before pulling the ship out of the ice itself. My understanding is that SHIELD is requesting custody of this as it is old HYDRA Nazi tech?”

Peggy stuttered. He said “remains.” Her brain rebelled at that. He wasn’t dead, Scott Lang said he wasn’t dead. He was there, comatose, injured…

“Director Carter?” 

Somewhere beyond her, she could hear voices calling her name, but it was Sharon who got her attention, finally, shaking her gently. “Peggy.”

“Right,” she snapped, not in anger, more trying to pull her rapidly fleeing wits back into herself. "Yes, SHIELD wants custody of the Valkyrie once it is extracted. That is technology we feel is perhaps safest in our hands.”

Montgomery didn’t particularly look as if he would quibble, and it was quite clear by the looks exchanged with Zimmer and Emmerson that this conversation had been had and agreements made. But, he at least had the grace to nod. “Of course, Director.”

They were there only a handful of minutes and already Peggy was exhausted. “Given the situation with the weapons on board is the wreckage stable enough that we can go inside.”

Montgomery raised a speculative look to Zimmer, who executed a curt nod.

“Give us 45 minutes, Director, we can have a team take you down into the wreckage itself.”

“Excellent.” Peggy released a breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding, her heart pounding in her ears even as she somehow managed a firm, no-nonsense expression. “If you can show Agent Carter and myself where our quarters are, we can set up while we wait.”

“Of course,” Zimmer jumped up, a hint of sympathy in his expression Peggy wasn’t so sure she wanted to see right now. “I hope you and Agent Carter don’t mind bunking together.”

“No,” Peggy murmured, following the other man’s lead through the crowded maze of operational spaces and other makeshift areas for the team assigned to digging Steve out. Just yards away after all these years, after wishes and dreams...and yet still so far away.

_Soon..._


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peggy finds a piece of her past.

Strange, Peggy mused to herself, she had thought that she was good at waiting.

Certainly, she was used to it; waiting on her brother to pay attention to her, waiting on her mother to accept what she wanted to be, waiting on her superiors to appreciate the talents she brought to the table, waiting on others to see and recognize her. Her life had been filled with waiting. Peggy would have expected it to instill more patience in her, but now it just felt so...tedious.

“I don’t think I have been so cold in my life and I’ve done missions in Siberia.” Sharon was keeping up a steady chatter behind her, a nervous energy that very much reminded Peggy of Sharon’s mother, Cynthia. “After three weeks there I had to pay Romanoff $100 bucks. I don’t know how she stands it.”

“The Red Room,” Peggy murmured, half listening, her mind continually drawn to the wreckage and what was hidden inside. “It’s part of her training, you know.”

“Well, that I know!” Sharon shrugged, leaning back on one of the bunks they’d been assigned, a thick, sub-zero sleeping bag spread out on the mattress underneath her. “Just I am a wuss and clearly she is not.”

Peggy thought of Dottie Underwood briefly, something she hadn’t done in a long time. Romanoff, like Dottie, was a survivor. So was Steve. Peggy seemed to know how to find them.

Sharon, sensing her aunt’s attention was not on the here and now, finally gave up on the mindless distraction. “Hey, Peg, you’ve found him. You are most of the way there.”

“I know,” she admitted, toe tapping on the utilitarian floor made of some metal that clearly didn’t freeze in this temperature. “I know and yet he’s still not here.”

“True,” Sharon agreed, slowly. “But we’ve got him, working yourself up won’t get him out any faster.”

She was right, Peggy knew she was right, but it did little to help. From that horrible day so long ago, sitting in the communications room in Johann Schmidt’s bunker deep in the Austrian Alps, she had lived with this sadness, this grief, this impossible hope and wish that they would find him, somehow. And while she had learned to move on, to let it go and finally live her life, that didn’t mean it completely went away. She supposed things like that never did. Every day of her arrival in this time and place she had missed Howard, Daniel, Edwin and Ana, her family, and yet she had pressed on, built a life for herself in this world. Now, after so long, she was going to get back a piece of herself she had thought she had lost forever, and she wanted it back so badly, she could taste it.

So very close…

A rap sounded on the door, Agent Zimmer’s head peeking in. “Director, Agent Carter, if you two are ready, we can go down.”

Peggy was up like a shot, reaching for her gear again. It was Sharon who answered the man with a “thanks” as she began slipping on her gear a touch more slowly than Peggy. She waited till Zimmer had slipped away again before speaking. “You ready for this?”

“Yes,” was Peggy’s emphatic answer.

“Okay,” Sharon murmured quietly, zipping herself up in her coat. “I just...if you aren’t, it’s okay not to be.”

“I’m fine,” Peggy muttered, though clearly she wasn’t, she knew she wasn’t, but she wasn’t about to admit that to her niece. “I understand, they won’t be able to get to him for a few days. Even then...who knows when he will wake. They have to figure out even how to go about waking him. Dr. Erskine didn't exactly speculate on a scenario like this.”

It was one thing to understand that rationally in her brain he would wake up and another to know that in her heart. Frankly, the two sides were threatening to tear Peggy to pieces, but she ignored the impulse to break down into tears, jamming her mask on with more force than was needed, the fabric fibers creaking with it. “I’m ready.”

“Let’s go,” Sharon muttered, opening the door and allowing Peggy out.

The complex itself was small, not even as big as the one Coulson had set up in New Mexico around Thor’s hammer, and they found the Canadian officer and Agent Zimmer easily enough. Both stood at the foot of rolling stairs that led to a metal hull, the paint faded with cold, salt and light, but still the familiar black that the _Valkyrie_ once sported. A hole was cut into it with precision, a puncture in the thick, black skin of the plane. She hadn’t been this close since she and Phillips had raced behind the awesome airship in Schmidt’s ridiculous vehicle, Steve hanging off the side of it precariously. She had kissed him then, the only kiss they had ever shared together. The stunned, gawping look on his face had almost been worth it.

“Director?” Colonel Montgomery snagged her attention, handing her a repelling rig of nylon and metal. “I assume you’ve used one of these?”

“Not in a while, but yes.” She accepted the tumble of harnesses, untangling it enough to slip it on. She noted both he and Agent Zimmer had already suited up in theirs and Sharon was expertly stepping in to her own. She slipped on the straps, uncomfortable but necessary as they were. Once she finished, Montgomery checked the fit and tightness, and when satisfied looked to the steps.

“I’m going to go down first, then I will act as spotter for you and Agent Carter. Zimmer will act as follow up. To be on the safe side, I would ask to confine your exploration to just the main cabin, as that is the only place I feel is safe.

Peggy nodded, numb with cold and emotions. She followed the colonel up the stairs to the neat hole, peering inside. A light had been set up, glittering off the frost and ice built up over decades inside the cold, metal interior. Two people - agents, soldiers, male, female, she couldn’t tell - stood on either side of what looked like a winch set up to allow them to lower people inside. Montgomery clicked his repelling rig in, nodding to the attendants as the engine operated machine began to carefully lower the colonel inside. Peggy watched him go and disappear into the darkness below where the light could touch.

“Director!” One of the attendants, a female judging from her voice, got her attention. “You’re up.”

Peggy nodded, the movement rasping the nylon of her warm coat loudly. She moved to clip the repelling lines on to her own harness, glancing back at Sharon as she did so.

“I’ll be right behind you,” Sharon assured her. She might have smiled, Peggy couldn’t tell through their gear. With a deep breath, she allowed herself to be winched up, off of her feet, then slowly guided by the attendants down into the circular hole and into the darkness.

It was only when her feet touched the slippery metal beneath that she could breath once again.

Montgomery was there, torch in hand, as he helped Peggy remove the rigging from her harness. She was glad of it, the cold made her fingers tremble, and she shoved them back into her mittens quickly, seeking the additional warmth of the heated fabric. She stepped out of the way, knowing that Sharon would be coming down behind her.

“Take this,” Montgomery handed her the torch, big, black and bulky, but shining a white-blue light over the scene. “I’ve got more. Don’t stray too far though.”

“I won’t,” Peggy assured him, clumsily wrapping her mittened fingers around the handle, holding it tightly as she swung it through the darkness.

The space was huge. She had only ever seen the _Valkyrie_ once, as it raced up the runway built into Schmidt’s bunker. Peggy recalled it as being massive then, needing a runway space impossibly huge to even get enough speed off to get it into the air, but even that didn’t prepare her for the cavern of steel and ice surrounding her. It was almost boastfully huge, as if Schmidt had built it to brag as much as to destroy, to hover over cities like a steel vulture, a metal and glass harbinger of death. The main cabin rose high above her, ridiculously so considering even modern air travel.

“This place reminds me of the Death Star,” Sharon breathed behind her, causing Peggy to whip around to her niece. She’d landed safely, obviously, and had followed Peggy through her foray. “Have you seen _Star Wars_ yet?”

“No,” Peggy returned, though she had heard of it. Sharon had worked on an entire list of pop cultural reference points for her to look into when she had the time. “Johann Schmidt didn’t believe in building small. For that matter, I doubt few in the Third Reich actually did.”

“No, I don’t think they did.” Sharon moved further in, towards the left, where snow and water had invaded, covering everything in glittering, frost-covered sheets. She pointed to a balustrade, indented in the middle and wrapped in frost. “Evidence of a fight?”

“Or the crash,” Peggy replied through stiff lips. Despite the heat in the coats themselves, she felt a chill as she walked across the slick and slippery surfaces, waving her torch this way and that. In the middle of the cabin stood a column of sorts; a pedestal was more like it. It was empty now, but the square hole in it told her what exactly had sat there, once. Howard had found the Tesseract mere months after Steve’s crash while he had been searching for him. Where it was now, she didn’t know, though she supposed it was in a SHIELD vault somewhere. She highly doubted that Howard would have let that out of SHIELD’s hands for any reason.

As if confirming her suspicion, there beside the column was burned a hole, exactly square in shape, now filled with ice and snow that had plunged up from the outside. Had Schmidt triggered the Tesseract? How? For that matter, where was Schmidt? He had been in the plane with Steve, but they had no details on what had happened, only that Schmidt was dead, but not how. His body, frozen or otherwise, was nowhere to be seen. Curious, she pushed towards what she presumed was the front, stopping as her light flickered over what looked like a platform, raised above everything else. In the middle sat a pilot’s chair, askew, a throne like edifice staring into a mountain of ice and snow.

It was empty.

She had hoped, perhaps naively, that that was where Steve would be, merely frozen to the seat despite what Montgomery had already told her. That clearly had been where he was when he had called her that fateful day.

_I’m going to need a raincheck on that dance…_

She blinked, tears freezing on her lashes as she stared at the ice in front of it. Long, dark strips stood out, like jagged teeth, indicated some sort of windshield, once, likely long gone in the original crash, if not in the collapse after. Peggy had seen more than a few crashes, many of them of Howard’s making, and knew the physics enough to know that if Steve wasn’t strapped into the seat then he had been thrown forward, where he likely was when everything came down on him. She stared hard into the blue-white pile of snow, long frozen, hoping she could see something, anything, a hand, a foot…

“How are they going to dig him out of that?” Sharon’s voice was soft and questioning beside her. She too had turned her light onto the wall of snow and ice, jammed as it was over the controls and into the seat, covering the entire platform. It was raised above the entire room. Peggy imagined that had the front windows been intact it would have been an awesome, even terrifying, sight.

“I’m sure that they have a plan.” What it was, Peggy didn’t know. She studied the space, frozen as it was, rimed in the frost of sixty-six years. Had Schmidt been successful, he would have ruled over the world unopposed. He’d have handily taken over the United States, that much was for certain, wiping out its populated eastern seaboard and the cities of New York and Washington DC, the financial and political capitals of the country, in one fell swoop. Then it wouldn’t have mattered if Hitler was losing in the war, because the Red Skull could have taken out the largest player on the European scene and taken over Hitler’s empire for himself. If Zola’s word was to be believed, that had been Schmidt’s plan the entire time.

But he failed. It had cost the world so much. It had cost Peggy considerably more.

“What’s this?” Sharon had moved up the steps and onto the platform, wandering to stare at the damage caused by the ice and snow. She bent, nearly toppling in her heavy clothes and ungainly boots, but she managed to keep herself steady as she poked at something that seemed attached to the frozen floor.

“What is it,” Peggy called, moving to the steps to investigate.

“Don’t know.” Sharon grunted, straightening to jam a booted toe against whatever it was. It scuffed, but after several tries something clearly broke through and skidded across metal and ice, pinging dully off the brittle metal piping separating the platform from the main cabin. It skittered off, into the darkness, clattering somewhere to Peggy’s right.

“Shit,” Sharon hissed, moving to the railing to shine her light down. “Do you see it?”

Peggy had already moved in the direction she thought it went, sweeping the wide beam of light back and forth slowly. Out of the shadows, laying on top of a pile of snow, something lay sideways, unfrozen. Snagging the end of her right mitten in her teeth, she pulled it off, reaching down to pick it up with nimble fingers, the metal so cold it hurt compared to the relative warmth of the mitten they had been in. She studied it, her mind already racing, screaming at her what it was, even before she turned it over.

“What is it,” Sharon called, curious.

Peggy’s hand trembled as she turned it over to stare at the worn and somewhat faded image of her own face.

_“Honestly, the entire base is talking.”_

_Steve easily kept pace with her march through the SSR’s London HQ, neither winded by her quickstep or ruffled by her temper. “I’m hardly the only fella' who keeps a picture in their pocket.”_

_“No, just the only one who has my picture in his compass.” She stopped, uncaring they were standing in the middle of a busy hallway, SSR staff moving to and fro, intelligence briefs and mission parameters in their hands, all of which were far more important than this conversation, at least in theory. In actuality, this conversation weighed a bit more to Peggy personally, particularly because of all the implications it had._

_“Where did you get that photograph anyway?”_

_Steve shrugged, clearly fumbling for a good answer. She couldn’t tell if he was earnestly perplexed or trying to be charmingly evasive. The bright spots on his high cheekbones seemed to indicate the latter. “If I tell you all my secrets, then how will I be able to surprise you?”_

_“The compass was certainly a surprise. Pity it was on film that was being shipped to show in American newsreels by the War Department. Now every lovely young woman who had their heart pinned on you after your USO tour will have it dashed because some brazen Brit has her picture in your pocket.”_

_“I wouldn’t call you brazen, far from it, actually.”_

_Peggy rolled her eyes and began marching again, her serviceable pumps clicking against the smoothed concrete floor._

_“Peggy, what’s this about, really?”_

_Peggy wasn’t sure she could even answer that._

_“I don’t know, Captain.” She finally slowed, turning to him again. It was still so odd to have to look up to him. When she first met him, he had looked up to her. Now, she found herself staring at the pins and bars on the broad chest of his uniform. “I just...wish I had some warning, that’s all.”_

_“Warning?” There was a hint of hurt in that simple word. She kicked herself, scrambling for a way to explain it._

_“In that room, I am an interloper.” She snapped her gaze up to his arch expression. “I am a woman in a room of men who are dissecting how this war will be won and how it is presented to the public. I am suffered in that room because Phillips has championed me to these men. When they see...my picture in your compass on a newsreel, they make assumptions, jump to conclusions.”_

_“About, I presume, you and me?”_

_His tone was light and teasing, but she knew his meaning was not. The same skinny, young man she sat with in that cab in Brooklyn looked back at her, the guy who no girl wanted to dance with, who had been rejected by every woman his best friend had thrown at him. Peggy was not that sort of girl, though._

_“Yes,” she murmured, trying to soften her meaning. “Steve...I am honored and...flattered you have my picture there. It means a lot to me that you do, just...I wish I had known is all. It would help me in navigating the assumptions and lewd expectations of men who assume that all women in uniform are here to catch husbands or seduce good soldiers away from their duty.”_

_“I don’t think anyone could accuse you of that.” He was teasing her._

_“You would be surprised,” she huffed, but finally softened, flushing as she realized that she was standing in the middle of everyone and everything around them, staring up into his eyes like a lovesick schoolgirl. “Anyway, you never did say where you got that.”_

_He tried and failed to look innocent as he shrugged, playfully. “I don’t know, Bucky may know a girl who handles the personnel files for all officers stationed here. I asked no questions when he passed it to me, though he might have rolled his eyes and said I was disgusting when he handed it to me.”_

_“Mmm, and this coming from the man who most likely seduced said clerical officer?”_

_“I make no judgments on how Sergeant Barnes came up with his ill gotten gains.”_

_He wouldn’t, she snorted, knowing Steve and Barnes would keep each other's secrets till their graves. “Well, then...you do know that people are going to assume.”_

_He shrugged, the corner of his mouth quirking just a bit, in that lopsided smirk of his. “They can assume what they like, as long as I do my job and you do yours, Agent Carter.”_

_Easy for him to say._

_“Right,” she sighed, finally breaking away from his spell, trying to pull herself back into a semblance of her cool, collected self. “Phillips will want you and your bunch of miscreants in the war room in an hour. Think you can get on top of that?”_

_“If you are done dressing me down, Agent?”_

_“That will be all, Captain.”_

_She did not miss the laughing gleam in his eye as he sketched a brief and completely unnecessary salute before marching off, presumably to find the reprobates he called his squadron._

_And he said he didn’t know how to talk to women, she snorted, returning to her duties with a small thrill of delight, knowing that he kept her picture on him wherever he went._

“Peggy,” Sharon’s mittened hand pulled lightly at her thick, puffy sleeve. Peggy blinked, turning towards her.

“Steve’s compass,” she said simply, holding it out in her still un-mittened hand. It sat there, cradled in her palm, the needle spinning dizzily as she tilted it under Sharon’s light. “He always had it. It was his father’s. He died in the Great War, before Steve was born.”

Sharon’s breath steamed out of her mask, dark eyes wide as she studied it. “What’s it doing out here then? Why isn’t it in one of his pockets?”

“I don’t know,” Peggy murmured, glancing to the pile of ice where Steve lay. Despite the faux pas of the film crew, who had caught it during one of his strategy meeting in the field, Steve had never really advertised it, usually choosing to keep it close to him and private...much like their fragile romance. They had never really spoken of it, never dared to speculate on what could be their future in a world torn by war. Peggy hadn't wanted to push or even give it voice, back then, not till the war was won, when their distractions were gone, they could be sure they could even have a life together. It had seemed so reasonable and practical then.

“Is that a picture of you?”

Even in the sub-zero temperatures, Peggy flushed. “Umm...yes.”

“That is so sweet!” She leaned in to study it, her light flashing hard on it. “Where did he get it?”

“Barnes got it and I asked no questions,” Peggy huffed, her heat aching as she gently snapped it closed. “I’ll hold on to it for now, till we get him out.”

“Director,” Agent Zimmer called. “The temperatures are dangerous and falling. We may want to get back inside.”

“Right,” she called, glancing to the space where Steve lay, buried. Absurdly, she wanted to call out to him, to reassure him they would be back, she was there and they would get him out. She knew he couldn’t hear her, however, so she said nothing, glancing to Sharon and gently pushing her along back to the repelling rig to get out. She slid the frozen compass into one of the pockets, however, her palm pressing it hard to her side as she did.

She had a piece of him back, and for now, that would have to be enough.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peggy cannot sleep.

Time almost had no meaning in the Arctic Circle in the winter. They were still weeks out from the true winter solstice, but the days and nights blurred together in a haze of darkness that seemed never ending. The shelter itself had its own alarm system and lighting to approximate times of day, but on the whole, for Peggy at least, it blurred into days of waiting...just...waiting.

Over the course of over a week they had carefully removed each and every one of the bombs still live within the ship, one for nearly every major metropolitan area east of the Mississippi River. Peggy had white knuckled those days, both because of the terrifying instability of the weapons produced so long ago using the Tesseract, but also from the knowledge of what that could have meant had Schmidt succeeded. One-by-one, each was carefully taken off shore of the massive glacier and the island that held it, defused carefully, the the remains packed up to be sent back to Washington DC for study. Now they were securing the ship itself, and hopefully within the next few days they would finally get to Steve.

She spent one sleepless night sitting in what had become a lounge area for those working on the Valkyrie project. It reeked of overheated coffee, which was always flowing in these freezing temperatures. Still, it was warm and she huddled there, unable to rest, doing what most other modern people did in these moments...reading through emails. She sipped at the weak tea she had managed to make, limp and lacking flavor, as she considered what she was up to at that moment. Strange how two years had changed even the way she processed her own confused thoughts. Had she still been in 1949 then, she would have likely paced the room, tried unsuccessfully to read a book or paper, fiddled with a radio and not listened to a word of it. Now, she was sitting with a laptop computer with more power than any of the code breaking machines she had seen before, checking the news of what was going on in New York in some far away, iced over island in Canada, and formulating answers to Agent Cassandra Kam’s myriad of questions. What a strange world she lived in...or not. After all, she wouldn’t be there now if long ago, in 1945, Steve hadn’t radioed her from here all the way back in the depths of the Austrian Alps.

What would he say when he woke to this brave, new world?

That thought had sat in the back of her mind more or less since she arrived here on New Years Day 2010, the strange and wonderful new world that she had wandered into and how he would react. Certainly it was different, the cellular phones alone had been a wonder and marvel for Peggy to behold, as had the sheer scope of the ability to communicate with one another. Everything from the digital light boards that lined Times Square to the wonder that was artificial intelligence that ran her flat near Lincoln Center was the sort of science fiction wonderment that Howard Stark could only have imagined and dreamed in her time. Modern medicine had improved by leaps and bounds, vaccines for any number of diseases were commonplace now, and science and engineering were moving at a pace that boggled the mind at times. The fact that Tony Stark had created a robotic suit as advanced as his Iron Man system was admittedly cutting edge for this time, but was the stuff of comic books in hers, beyond even imagining. 

That was just the technology alone, the political situation frankly had been more challenging than the technological piece had been to understand. It had evolved far beyond the black-and-white scenarios of World War II and the Cold War that had just been gearing up in her memory had loomed large over much of the time she had skipped. They were living in a new world now, a new age, shaped by the intrigues of the two large superpowers, but with different fears, different threats, all pushed and pulled by the technological changes over the last few decades. Now, those threats were going to get bigger, those challenges were going to be far more than just the international sniping of nation states.

And yet...despite all of that, much of the world was still just the same as when she had left it. Impossible threats seemed to be forgotten in the whirl of mass media and the need to escape it all. In her time it was movies and radio, and now they simply added television and the internet to it. Fashion had changed, certainly - she wasn’t sure it was for the better - and sexual mores where not the hushed topics they once were. Gender roles and cultural questions were wrestled with in a whole new and different way than they had been in the 1940s. While it was perhaps louder, crazier, sexier, more of everything now, at its heart the world wasn’t so different now in 1949 as it was in 2011. Perhaps in the end that was why Peggy had settled into this world so quickly. Despite its cell phones and loudness, the computers everywhere and the interconnectedness of everyone’s lives, in the end it wasn’t really all that different from the world she had left behind, not in his core at least.

The bigger question for Peggy was would Steve be up for it? He had proven himself adaptable to so much all of his life - the lack of a father, a working mother, his ill health and the physical limitations of that, to even the changes wrought by the serum itself. Time and time again, Steve Rogers proved he could adapt to just about anything thrown his way, often with a grace and humor few possessed. This was perhaps the biggest upheaval he would ever know, however, an unexpected leap through decades. He had crashed the _Valkyrie_ in the ice years ago never expecting to survive. He had gone to his death willingly. 

What would he say when he realized he wasn’t dead? 

Would he be happy to even be alive? 

Would he be happy he was back home in New York, albeit decades after he remembered it. 

Would he be happy to see her?

What would she even say to him and how could she explain any of it? 

“A penny for your thoughts?” Sharon’s question cut through Peggy’s spiral of speculation, shaking her loose from her swirl of anxiety and worry as she realized she’d been staring at the utilitarian walls for several minutes, her cup of thin tea in hand.

Peggy chose to evade the obvious question. “How long have you been standing there?”

“Long enough to wonder if there were shape-shifting aliens outside trying to eat all of us.”

Peggy blinked, horrified, staring at Sharon wildly as the other woman realized she clearly didn’t get the reference. “I’m sorry, it’s...it’s a movie, one that scared the hell out of me as a child. There aren’t shape-shifting aliens that I know of.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Peggy shrugged as Sharon moved to pour herself a mug of coffee and settle across the table. “I’ve only ever met the one and he looked rather normal enough. Much like any other person on the street.”

“Except...you know...a god.” While not official on the Avengers team, a fact Peggy had hoped to remedy in the future, Sharon was still abreast of many of Peggy’s adventures. The idea that not only were the Norse gods real but that at least one of them looked like...well, the way Thor looked...had interested her niece immensely, earning many eye rolls from Peggy.

“I did warn you that he seemed to be attracted to Dr. Foster, did I not?”

Sharon only grinned. “I have eyes, don’t I?”

That did manage to make Peggy laugh, despite herself, which seemed to be Sharon’s whole point. “I won’t deny he is very...fit as they said in my day.”

“They say it now too, so don’t make yourself out to be an old fogey yet.”

Peggy hummed, sipping at her tea. “I don’t know, I am starting to feel like it a bit the last few days.”

Sharon at least understood. Her niece had been there practically since Peggy had stepped into 2010. At first blush they wouldn’t precisely look like relatives, and in truth, they were far enough apart to be forgiven that speculation. Sharon’s looks did favor her mother more than the Carter side, but when one paid attention they could see it; the turn of her jaw, the arch of an eyebrow, the same dark brown eyes as Peggy’s, often serious until she wasn’t. Sharon was her own person, that much was for certain as Peggy had gotten to know her determined and driven niece, but in many ways she reminded Peggy of herself just a scant few years ago. Far from just being a relative, Sharon had proven out to be a friend and confidant, and when the news had broken from Hill that SHIELD had found Steve’s wreckage, she was the first person Peggy thought to call.

“You know,” Sharon began, grimacing from a swallow of whatever passed for coffee in the community pot. “I didn’t think about how hard this has to be for you, sitting here, knowing he’s alive somewhere in there, wanting to get him out and knowing you have to do it safely, wondering what it will be like when you do get him out.”

With unerring accuracy, Sharon had pegged Peggy’s sleeplessness right on the money. She teasingly held up her cup of tepid tea in silent salute. “You know me so well!”

“Before you applaud my insight, it is a very human reaction.” Sharon raised a shoulder in a mild shrug. “Anyone in this instance would be where you are. That said, I don’t think they would have handled it half as sanely as you have.”

“You are assuming I am anything close to sane,” Peggy snorted, closing the laptop she hadn’t even been looking at. “You are talking to the woman who jumped through time on a whim.”

“Well, there is that. Still, you aren’t a hysterical mess, which is more than I could say for many.”

“I don’t have the luxury of time or space for hysterics,” Peggy replied, loftily, making Sharon snort into her coffee.

“Of course not, not with that stiff-upper lip.”

“Got me through a war, didn’t it?”

“That it did.” Sharon’s smile was infectious, lightening Peggy’s mood. “You’ve gotten through….bombs and bullets, through HYDRA and insane spy missions, through Howard Stark and all of his craziness. You’ll get through this too.”

“I know,” she nodded, and she did. She had no doubt she would. That didn’t stop the worry. “This is a strange place, you know. When he wakes up…”

“I’m sure he will manage, just as you have.”

Peggy wasn’t sure how she had. “I made the choice to come here, though. I had the ability to pack up my life, to write my letters, to say goodbye, however briefly, to the world I was leaving behind. Steve...he didn’t get that chance, not really. I mean, there I was on the radio, making plans for us to go dancing, all the while he knew he was...never going to make it.”

She hated how her voice broke there, even after all these years.

“Anyway,” she sniffed, ignoring the ways her eyes and nose burned. “He didn’t have a chance to say goodbye, not really. I think he felt that was all right if he was going to die. But now he will have to figure out how to live in a world that has passed him by, with everyone he knew and loved long dead. And that...that is a whole different thing all together.”

Sharon listened, quietly, running a manicured nail around the rim of her cup, her expression thoughtful. She was a long moment before she did speak. “You figured it out. You sacrificed all of that yourself coming here. You left behind more, I would argue; your family, your friends, SHIELD.”

She had and that had been far more painful than she had anticipated. The loss of Howard, the Jarvises, Daniel, her family, they had all seemed small in the moment of going to the future and saving the universe. But when she arrived and realized just what she had done and what she had lost, it had hurt so much more.

“I was lucky,” Peggy reasoned, considering all that had happened. “I lucked out, honestly. I found Juan on the street almost the very instant I landed. Then he dragged me to his apartment, where Julio was, half convinced I was some insane drifter that Juan had brought home. They got me on my feet. Honestly, I was shocked that Fury didn’t have me locked up that day for the sheer insanity of it, but he didn’t and then gave me the Avengers to boot, then sent you along. I didn’t even know you existed.”

“Well, considering Dad’s age when you disappeared, I would have been shocked if you did,” Sharon teased.

That did make Peggy laugh, remembering how shocked she had been that her nephew, Harrison, had a family at all. “Every step of the way since I got here there have been new people who have come into my life, who have helped shore it up and keep me afloat when I could have just lost myself - you, Cassandra, Phil, Juan & Julio, the family, finding Angie again...even connecting with Stark in his own, high-handed way. I suppose I didn’t consider till now how much of a life I rebuilt for myself here. I thought I had walked away from all of it and then I found something new.” 

Sharon pondered that, briefly. “You always did have the ability to just pick up stakes and start all over again. I mean, you could say about that what you will, but there is something strong in that too. I’ve never had to walk away from anything. I live a half-hour drive from my family, I went to college at Georgetown, all I ever wanted to do was work at SHIELD. So, I worked hard to get myself in there on my own merit, but still, I never thought about do anything different. I’ve never had to give up my family, my goals, my way of life for anything bigger than myself. You’ve done it...what, several times over?”

“I was hardly the only one,” Peggy quickly threw out there, wary of Sharon’s pedestal. “So many people did back then, and many of them gave up far more than I did.”

“Like Steve Rogers?”

“I was thinking of Barnes in the moment, actually.” Steve of course was the logical place to jump to, but strangely it had been his best friend who had come top of mine then. “Bucky died just days before Steve’s final mission.”

Poor Barnes often got forgotten in the mythos that had built up around Steve and his tragic plane crash. Even Peggy often forgot, much to her own chagrin. She doubted Steve ever would.

“Barnes had a family, you know, parents, sisters, not just Steve. I thought about that when Steve crashed, how the Barnes family had lost so much. They lost two sons in a way, all within days of each other. I never did check in on them, see how they were doing.”

She had always told herself it was because she got too busy. In truth, it was because it hurt too much, the idea of looking up the Barneses and seeing the people that had meant so much to Steve, who had helped to raise him. Besides, it didn’t feel right, interjecting herself into their grief. They didn’t know her and her one connection to them had been through their son and his best friend, and more the best friend than the son.

“Anyway,” Peggy continued, voice thick, “all that to say I wasn’t the only one who sacrificed, and certainly there were so many others who sacrificed far more than I did. I got to go home and start again. I suppose now Steve will as well.”

“He will be fine, Peggy.” Sharon’s simple statement was a voice of reassurance. “He’s got you. He will get this figured out.”

Despite the warmth of affection towards her niece this spurred in Peggy, she only wished it were as simple as Sharon seemed to think it was.

Whatever she might have said in comment to that died, however, as the door to the space opened once again. Agent Zimmer peeked in, looking relieved when he found Peggy sitting there.

“I’ve been looking all over for you. We managed to get his shield.”

Peggy was on her feet before he even uttered the last syllable of the world “shield”. She threw herself at the door, across the narrow hallway, and to the area they had been so carefully and assiduously been collecting pieces and artifacts from the ship itself. Metal tables were lined with bits and baubles off of Schmidt’s ridiculously large aircraft, but there was only one object she cared about in the moment.

It lay on the main table on its back, curving upwards, still glazed in a sheet of ice. Even still, that couldn’t diminish the bright red and vibrant blue as she moved towards it, reverently. It had been so long since she had seen it, since she last saw it on Steve’s back, protecting him from the blades of the _Valkyrie’s_ propellers, before he had thrown himself on board of it, holding on for dear life. Even through the ice she could see the long scratches in the paint, the metal beneath it smooth and polished.

“Oh my God,” Sharon whispered, steps behind her, eyes wide in wonder. “That’s….that’s really it.”

“Yes it is.” Peggy's voice caught, her fingers tracing the star in its middle.

Agent Zimmer stood at the far end of the table, reverence and awe in his expression. “Is it true it’s made of vibranium?”

“That’s what Howard Stark said,” Peggy confirmed, somewhat absently, wishing she could actually touch it, to at least see that it was real and not a figment of her imagination.

“How did he get that much,” Sharon wondered. Even in today’s economy, vibranium remained rare indeed, a metal that was only really found in small, trace amounts in the country of Wakanda, a nation so poor that most of the colonial powers hadn’t bothered with it as it had little to offer in terms of raw materials to power an industrial complex. How Howard had found even that much still remained a mystery.

“He didn’t say outside of cryptically admitting he got it as a favor done for someone there and that it was all legitimate. He never did explain much beyond that, which means that while it was legitimate I have a feeling that what he did to get it was not.” With Howard one could never be quite certain. “Steve rather liked the idea of a shield, Howard had made dozens; some with slots for guns, one with an electric relay that allowed him to attach it magnetically.”

“Why this one,” Sharon wondered, leaning against the steel table.

“I never knew, outside of the fact he liked that it was lightweight and absorbed vibration. He always swore that it gave it extra kick, whatever that meant.” All Peggy knew was that she had seen it in action and he was deadly with it. “Other than that, I think he fell in love with it at first sight the way Howard carried on about it.”

Peggy just did stop from rolling her eyes. Howard always did have a habit of romanticizing most everything about Steve, a trait that was much about Howard's own ego as it was about the care for his friend. All Peggy remembered about the moment was that she had been beyond angry with Steve and he’d been as eager as a school boy showing off his new toy to her. She had...not reacted well.

“I shot at him,” Peggy grinned, shaking her head. “It’s how we knew the shield worked.”

Even Zimmer stared at her as if she were mad, which in fairness, Peggy wasn’t certain she wasn’t. Sharon, who had heard this story from her youth, only snorted, muttering something about not getting on her bad side.

“Duly noted,” Zimmer muttered, glancing between the two. “I got word from Deputy Director Hill earlier, they are sending up the retrieval team tomorrow. They have a full unit of scientists coming down, plus a medical unit for when they do find him.”

Peggy’s heart lurched. “And then what?”

“If the medical team determines that his body isn’t a biological risk, they will fly him back to New York. They have a facility set up there and a team waiting to try and figure out how...well, to wake him up, I suppose.”

Like Snow White, Peggy thought to herself, mildly. Somehow, she felt Steve would be greatly amused by that. Peggy, however, just wanted him awake.

“Let me know when the team arrives,” Peggy replied, with one last, quiet look at Steve’s shield.

Perhaps, finally, she could get her mind to finally go to sleep.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peggy has a breakthrough.

“Do we even know the condition of his remains?” The lead researcher, a woman by the last name of Young, sat reviewing a tablet of data, chatting with a doctor by the name of Bransteitter. Both of them had been in this conversation for thirty minutes, numbing Peggy’s mind as she tried to piece together what they even planned to do in terms of treatment.

“We won’t know that till he is pulled out, but I imagine that at the very least we are looking at the sort of trauma you find in a high impact collision.”

“Yes, but the serum would have fixed some of that, right?”

“Well, maybe, if it even works in sub-zero temperatures. It could just be holding the body in stasis for now till it can expend energy in mending.”

Peggy finally cut in, he brain too dulled by this talk to take any more of it. “Those aren’t his remains, you know.”

Both women stopped to blink at her. They meant well, the two scientists, one a biochemist who had done some research on the serum, the other a medical doctor who had no experience with it, but who Hill had trusted on a mission as top-secret as this. They surely would have some ideas better than Peggy, who was limited only to her knowledge of how Erskine’s formula was supposed to work, not how it actually did. But, in their detached, scientific way, they kept thinking of Steve, of the man who was waiting to be pulled out of the ice, as a body...a thing...not a human man with thoughts and feelings, not someone who was alive. It finally had pushed Peggy to her limit.

“You keep speaking as if he is dead,” Peggy snapped at them both, frustration evident. She didn’t care in the moment. “He’s merely in a coma, that is all. Could we just...not refer to him continually as ‘remains’.”

She wasn’t sure either woman had known they had said it and both blushed furiously, with the biochemist, Dr. Young, nodding, her mouth forming a round O in her embarrassment as she fumbled for words. “Of course, Director, I mean...we didn’t…”

“That is to say, we shouldn’t have been thinking of Captain Rogers as…” Dr. Bransteitter cut in and trailed off, her expression softening into apologetic misery.

Now Peggy felt guilt for her own frayed nerves and short temper. “It’s all right, it’s just..when will they have him out again?”

Young, eager to cover their faux pas, glanced at her watch, some sort of higher tech, SHIELD device that linked her to communications down inside the Valkyrie. “They are looking at within the hour. He was buried deep in there.”

“Which is probably a good thing,” Bransteitter popped up, with a false, bright cheerfulness that was the sort that Peggy was sure she meant to sooth Peggy's nerves. “It means he’s had a continuous state of temperature and pressure, which in terms of preservation…”

A loud thump sounded from under the table and Bransteitter winced. Peggy was fairly certain that Dr. Young had just kicked her colleague soundly. The other woman turned purple and returned to her tablet, muttering about shutting up now.

“Anyway,” Young continued, cutting her eyes behind her thick glasses at the chastised Bransteitter, “they will be pulling him out hopefully soon. I know they will let you know as soon as they do.”

“Right,” Peggy breathed, reassured and yet so high strung she felt she would claw her way up the sterile, makeshift walls. They had been at this nearly three weeks already. Three weeks on this frozen hunk of ice just off the Canadian coastline, carefully stabilizing the _Valkyrie_ and just getting to Steve. She could wait another few minutes….possibly.

“I’m going to check on Agent Carter.” Peggy snapped her own computer shut, shooting a tight, brief smile at them both. “Excuse me.”

She rushed out of the meeting area to...where, exactly. The entire area was a self-contained bubble, easily made and expanded as she discovered when more and more scientists and military experts came to work on the wreckage. Even so, it still held a limited number of places Peggy could just step away...escape...breath. The outdoors weren’t even an option, with temperatures dangerously below zero, and as for the indoors...every bit of it had someone, somewhere. There were precious few places where she could go and hide, even for a few moments. It all rather reminded her of the SSR HQ in London, frankly. They had all lived in bunkers on top of one another in the heart of the city then.

_“Why are you hiding here?”_

_Peggy should have been surprised that Rogers had found her, but she wasn’t. She barely turned from her perch on the roof, overlooking parts of inner London in the distance. She didn’t need to turn to see who it was, she could have recognized his warm, baritone voice with his particular accent anywhere, especially in London._

_“I’m not precisely hiding,” Peggy shot back with some asperity, though in truth, she was. There were precious few places in the rabbit warren they called headquarters where a person could have a cry and and a good think, and the roof was one. Most people who wandered by saw it simply as a boring block of office buildings, somehow spared the destruction of many warehouses and factories nearby. “Did you need something?”_

_“No,” Rogers shrugged, shoulders broad under his work uniform, hands in his pocket as he wandered over to her. In the darkness, she could just make out his profile in the moonlight. “Just checking on you, is all.”_

_“Stark told you?”_

_“About Miller? Yeah.”_

_Peggy sighed and nodded. It wasn’t precisely a secret, she supposed, but she wished, briefly, Howard Stark wasn’t so much of a horrible gossip. “I was the one who made the call on him, you know.”_

_“I know.” He leaned against the side of the building overlooking the black street below. Nothing, not even the street lights, were on in the darkened city._

_“I stand by my choice.”_

_“You should.”_

_Peggy wished Rogers weren’t so damn agreeable. “Still doesn’t help the fact that he’s dead and he has a wife and children who are left behind because I decided to send him into harm’s way, now does it?”_

_Rogers sigh in the darkness was long and regretful. “No, it doesn’t.”_

_“I told him he’d get home to see his baby. Just a wee thing, not even two months. Never even got to see her.”_

_“He knew his odds, Peggy. He signed up for this.”_

_“Did he?” She wasn’t particularly sure it was as cut and dry as all that. “Before the war he was just a clerk, had a settled life. I chose him because he was a boring, normal, average person, a man so bland that one could wander into an office and never think twice about him. But he had a quick mind and could slip in easily. Another two minutes, he would have been out of there, and…”_

_“He knew what he was getting into,” Rogers pointed out, firmly, a hint of authority in his tone that he rarely ever turned on her. “You might have given him the assignment, but he knew what he was in for, Peggy. We all know what we are in for; me, you, everyone in those rooms below, even Miller. He wouldn’t have agreed to the mission if he didn’t.”_

_Peggy wished, desperately, she could believe that._

_“Why did you join?” His question caught her off guard. Despite the darkness, her gaze snapped over to him, surprised that this had not yet come up between them in conversation. Certainly, it was one of the first things most men asked, especially given the fact she was an attractive woman in the position she was in. Somehow, the idea she might want to serve her country as well seemed to baffle most of them._

_“I...wanted to do my part, I suppose.” It was her standard, patented answer, one that didn’t seem to cause many waves with those still squeamish about the idea of a woman in uniform. However, she knew Steve Rogers didn’t buy it. Even in the silvery moonlight she could see his skeptical expression._

_“What? It is the same reason you have. You can want to join, but I can’t?”_

_“I wanted to join to stop a fascist government.” There was a hint of a chuckle in his voice. “Remember, I don’t like bullies.”_

_Peggy knew damn good and well Steve Rogers had more reasons to fight than he ever let on. How could he not? A man who for all of his life had been small and unspectacular, picked on and bullied, who knew all too well what it was like to feel vulnerable and helpless, he had desperately wanted to join. Not just to prove himself, which thus far he had done admirable, but really it was because he knew what it was like to be that person caught in the crossfire, to be persecuted by a regime that threatened to take what you held dear. He knew what it meant to stand up and say no, even when you knew it would likely end up with you being punched in the face._

_Perhaps he did understand Miller after all._

_“I...joined because of my brother,” Peggy finally admitted, picking nervously at the grit and gravel on the edge of the rooftop wall, flicking a pebble off the side and into the darkness. “My older brother...Michael.”_

_He said nothing, but remained quiet as she gathered herself, surprised by the swell of emotions mentioning her brother brought to the fore._

_“He...he and I were always talking about mad adventures together.” She laughed, softly, remembering all of their insane, childish plans. “Perhaps search for hidden treasure in the jungle, or becoming ranchers in the Old West, silly things like that. When I was a little girl, my favorite game was to play at being knights. I wasn’t the damsel in distress, mind you, I was a knight too.”_

_She could hear the smile in Rogers’ voice at the very idea. “I could never see you as anything else but a knight. You’d be a horrible damsel in distress.”_

_“What and lay pining in some tree for Michael to ‘rescue’ me. He’d have forgotten me and gone off to tea and eaten all the biscuits, and I’d have had to save myself anyway.” Even now she still had a sense of childish outrage at the notion. “Mother always scolded me for it, because invariably I’d end up filthy with a torn hem, but Michael always thought it was grand. He always told me I could be anything.”_

_Rogers was circumspect for long moments as Peggy fell silent, taking a moment to revel in the haze of golden childhood. When he spoke again, it was a quiet rumble. “When did he die?”_

_Peggy wasn't shocked he sussed that out._

_“1940,” she replied, succinctly. “I was supposed to be getting married in a few days. We got the telegram...I still remember my mother’s scream, my father catching her, just...it was awful.”_

_If she closed her eyes, she could still hear it, her mother’s sobs from the gate below her bedroom window, the soldiers there looking helplessly on._

_“Before he died, Michael and I had gotten into an argument,” Peggy continued, her voice thick. “About...about Fred, my fiance. I had left Bletchley Park to be with him, was going to settle down to be a housewife. Michael thought that was bollocks. He said I’d be miserable living with the likes of Fred Wells.”_

_She chuckled, wetly, wiping a stray tear away as she considered. “I hate to admit it, but he was right. Michael usually was, not that I’d ever say that to his face if he were here. He’d been trying to get me a position at the SOE, you see, thought that I was a fit for it. When he died...well, I took off Fred’s ring and I went to Baker Street. It was impetuous, perhaps...impulsive, but it was perhaps the first honest decision I made in my life thus far.”_

_One fateful decision, and here she was, far removed from her family home, from Fred Wells, and everything else she thought she wanted when she was nineteen-years-old. The life she had wanted then seemed laughable now, a foolish desire that wasn’t even hers to begin with. Everything had changed in that moment...or perhaps, everything came into focus in that moment._

_Rogers was quiet for a long time before speaking again. “I’m sorry for your loss.”_

_“It was long ago.”_

_“Still, I get it.” She couldn’t precisely see it, but she imagined he was giving her one of his quirky, half smiles, one that he was fond of whenever he was sad or apologetic. “My mom, she died...October of ‘36. Tuberculosis, caught it working the ward.”_

_Peggy knew of what his mother had died, but not how. “She was a nurse?”_

_“Yeah,” he replied, a hint of roughness in that single syllable, a wound that still hurt even after all these years. “She knew the risks, though. She did it anyway. I used to ask her why she’d chance it and she said that most of those people in there wouldn’t be able to see their families or be with them. She didn’t like the idea of them dying alone.”_

_Whether Steve Rogers realized he did it or not, he’d just revealed a very key part of himself to her. Certainly, his mother’s response was one that reminded Peggy very much of her son. “She must have been a brave woman.”_

_“She was,” he affirmed, readily. “I seem to know quite a few really brave women willing to risk a lot to do what was right.”_

_Peggy was suddenly very glad for the utter darkness of London, hidden from the eyes of Nazi bombers. She could feel her cheeks glowing even as she ducked her head, picking at the crumbling stone on the top of the wall._

_“Anyway,” Rogers finally drawled, his feet scuffing as he turned away, back towards the singular stairs that led to the roof. “Phillips sent me to find you because he wanted some report, but between you and me, I think he’s just worried and wanted to make sure you are okay. I can let him know you are and leave you to it, if you want.”_

_It was the sort of sweet gesture she had become used to receiving from him in their brief time around one another, the offer to cover for her while she mourned the loss of a man she had sent into danger. “No, I’ll be inside in a moment. Let him know I will meet him in his office.”_

_“Of course.” He moved in the darkness, his steps amazingly light for the now larger, taller man he’d become. As he did, Peggy heard herself calling, softly, back towards him._

_“Thank you, Steve.”_

_He hesitated only a second. “Anything for you, Peggy.”_

“Peggy! Hey, you okay?”

Peggy turned to the sound of Sharon’s sharp voice, concern written all over her face. How long she’d been trying to get Peggy’s attention, she didn’t know. Some time judging from the arched eyebrow as Sharon gently let go of her arm. “You were somewhere. Clearly, not here.”

Here was rather a surprise to Peggy, as well. She was standing in the small observation area overlooking work in the _Valkyrie_. To do their excavation, they’d had to cut through a large section of the plane itself, and to ensure that everything was safe they had built over it a staging area that looked into where they team dug carefully, scraping out snow, slicing through ice with laser cutters that sheared it off in perfect, clear sheets. She must have wandered here while her thoughts were elsewhere.

“I was...wool gathering.” She slipped on a reassuring smile for her niece, not quite feeling it. “All well back home?”

“Yeah,” Sharon muttered, simply, not that she would speak in detail. As a working SHIELD operative, her position did not deal with the Avengers or anything Peggy was handling and thus much of it remained a mystery to Peggy. For that, Peggy was somewhat grateful. She was all too aware what an operative in Sharon’s position would and could be asked to do. The less she knew, the less she would worry about her. She was simply glad she had her here for the moment.

“I figured that I would find you here,” Sharon continued, leaning against one of the frames of the roughshod construction. “Any progress.”

“The science team feels confident they will have him out today.” Peggy eyed the work below. The entire front nose of the Valkyrie had crumpled in the impact, the wall of glass that had curved around it smashed into smithereens, the framework bent inward like a cage that had been beaten in. Steve himself had been thrown through that, deep into a pocket of what had been icy water, submerged and buried beneath fallen ice and snow, well clear of the ship itself, but blocked by its tilted body. They’d had to excavate an entire section, moving deep down into the glacier even to find him. The geologists had winced at this, something about scientific evidence and data, but had seemingly been pacified when Peggy had said simply they could have all the ice they wanted from the refuse, so long as they got Captain Rogers out. They had quietly ceased their grumbling and thanked her.

“No one believes he’s really alive down there,” Peggy sighed, watching as the team worked. “Not really. They keep saying ‘his remains’ as if he were dead.”

“To be fair, he kind of should be,” Sharon offered, quietly, the voice of reason in all of this. “I think it’s hard for some people to believe he isn’t.

“The man took on an entire HYDRA base by himself just to save his best friend and they have trouble believing he survived a plane crash?”

“A plane crash and nearly seventy years of being frozen in ice. That’s not a small thing.”

She was right, but in her petulance Peggy didn’t want to hear it.

“What’s this about?” Sharon cut to the heart of the matter. She was always efficient like that, a trait that reminded Peggy of herself.

“I don’t know,” she muttered, watching as the team below began to gather crowbars and ice picks. “I just...suppose it’s a bit hard to believe that this is real, that he is there, that I can...even see him soon. I’d spent so long wishing...I’d moved on, you know, I really had. I’d let him go. I had decided to live my life. I had a life of my own. He was hardly the first lost soldier I had mourned, the first lost friend, the first person I had loved that I had lost in that war, but...I had moved on.”

She thought she had...until Daniel had gotten down on one knee and Lang had swooped in with news of Steve Rogers. “I don’t know if any of this even makes sense, really. I just realize that I am...scared. Scared about a lot of things, honestly. That when they pull him out we won’t be able to wake him. I'm scared that when he does wake, he won’t remember anything. What if his experience has changed him? What if I’ve changed too much? I mean, it has been six years for me, a blink of an eye for him. What if all of that is different? I mean, it’s bad enough that the world is different already, and the one person he does know is me, and here I am using computers and cell phones and living in a world I wouldn’t have imagined two years ago…”

“Peggy,” Sharon cut through her verbal anxiety spiral, looping an arm around hers to shake her, gently, bringing Peggy to a stop. Peggy turned to her, seeing the worry and the tears in her niece’s eyes.

“It’s alright to be scared, you know,” Sharon reassured her, her arm tightening on Peggy’s. “And it’s all right to worry.”

Peggy couldn’t really explain why she felt all the things, only that she did. “I said he wouldn't be alone.” She sniffed, fat tears dribbling down as she felt her expression crumple. “When Barnes died, I said…”

“Oh, Peggy!” Sharon wrapped her arms around Peggy’s shoulders, holding her tightly as Peggy went quietly to pieces, sobbing for reasons even she couldn’t quite understand. All the years she had mourned him, all the hurt that still remained even long after that radio signal turned to static, for the choices she made and the people she’d hurt because of them, for the uncertainty of the future and what it even meant for Steve. Most of all, perhaps, was the knowledge that he had been here, frozen and alone, for six-and-a-half decades, an entire lifetime, before she found him. There was guilt there, unreasonable or no, and it hurt to know it had taken her so long to bring him home.

The storm finally subsided. She pulled away, her face a sodden, wet wreck as she wiped at her cheeks, feeling foolish as she did so. Sharon pulled a napkin from her pocket, wryly handing over the crumpled bit of tissue paper as Peggy tried to blot the worst of it. “Feel any better?”

“I feel like a right idiot is what I feel like,” Peggy groused, her nose clogged and her throat raw. “Worked up like that and I don’t even really know why.”

“Sometimes it doesn’t make sense.” Sharon was rather placid about all of this, but then again, she had a background in psychology on top of other things. It was one of the tools of spycraft in this modern day and age. “Honestly, after everything you’ve seen and experienced, Peggy, the fact that you aren’t a hot mess amazes me. Everyone is once in a while, and this situation more than most should trigger you. One of the worst moments of your life and here you are relieving it even as you know he is alive in there. Frankly, I was expecting you to break long before this.”

“Too stubborn, I guess.” She chuckled, wetly, blowing her nose discreetly before crumpling the napkin to throw away later. “I just...didn’t realize, I suppose, how much this would affect me.”

“You are still human after all,” Sharon teased.

“Considering how often people, you included, want to put me up on that pedestal…”

A shout below interrupted anything Peggy had to say. She and Sharon turned their attention to the work below, the sound of engines gearing up and chains clanking as they were attached to one particular section of ice. Peggy’s heart leapt.

“They’ve got him!”

Quick as a dart she was out of the observation booth and down to the makeshift bay leading out to the work area. The cold was biting, stinging her tear-swollen face, and it was belatedly that she realized she had no coat, no gloves, or anything warm to protect her. Still, she stood in the shelter, watching as a winch was attached to the ice, workers signaling to tighten the chain and pull the section out of its prison.

She shivered with the abject cold and with terrified excitement. It was only when a coat had been wrapped around her shoulders that she realized Sharon had joined her. Ruefully, she nodded her thanks, taking off the coat long enough to slip it on properly and zip it, before pulling on her protective mittens. Out where they worked, the engine strained as the chain rattled, the sound of ice popping and cracking ringing through the Valkyrie.

And then, it was done. A slab of ice, perfectly rectangular, pulled from the area excavated, shooting out as workers yelled and shouted, slowing it down with cheers and whoops. Peggy waited, in a daze as they brought it into the bay, breathless and triumphant, their comments muffled by their protective gear and the general good nature of it all.

When the block of clear, bluish ice was pushed into the bay itself by the team, only then did Peggy find her breath again. A general quiet followed among the team. She wasn’t sure if any of them knew the truth about who she was and what her connection to Steve Rogers could be, but they at least allowed her access as she approached eagerly, perhaps a bit frantically, peering into the slab below. The lasers had cut it to level perfection, smooth as glass, a coffin of clear, cold crystal and she had no problem seeing his face.

She nearly broke all over again. Had Sharon not been gripping her elbow so tightly, she might just have. He seemed to float inside, his arms thrown upwards, as if he’d been protecting his head when he’d been pitched out. Perhaps he had, she noted, as he was missing his helmet somewhere, his hair caught in suspended animation, frozen in place. Not even his uniform had changed, the canvas and nylon perfectly preserved, the star in the middle of his chest still a bright batch of white, a beacon of hope for Peggy. That said, everything else about Steve looked bloated and unnatural, his skin pale and gray, his full mouth open, his blue eyes closed. None of it was natural. It was a horror, the worst of nightmares, and yet...it was also the most beautiful thing she’d seen in her whole life.

It was him...it was really him…

She wasn’t sure how she found her voice or even how she managed not to collapse on the spot. As she straightened, she found within herself the same woman that had stood toe-to-toe against the likes of Chester Phillips and John Flynn and refused to back down. “Get Captain Rogers into the medical bay for them to examine. Someone, have the team begin preparing a quinjet for transport. I want the captain on it within the next 24 hours to the facility in New York.”

As various members of the team hopped to her commands, Peggy could help but looked towards Steve’s so still, quiescent face. She was sad, terrified, and thrilled beyond words. How could she feel all these emotions all at once?

“You really did it,” Sharon beside her breathed, a hint of disbelief in her voice. Peggy wasn’t sure why Sharon was so surprised, or why she found the comment so very hysterical. The burble of laughter that erupted from her sounded half-frantic, half-giddy, and all relieved.

“Yes,” she managed to get out, wanting nothing more than to collapse in sheer relief. “We actually did.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peggy is tasked with something she would rather not have to deal with.

It had taken nearly seventy years, but Steve Rogers was finally home.

After 2500 miles and a team of experts to get him there, of course. They were the ones who had hustled the cryogenic freezing pod through the SHIELD headquarters in New York, mostly under the cover of the early, winter evening. The whole process was so clandestine one would have been forgiven in thinking that they were hiding some sort of secret weapon or dangerous criminal instead of the most famous hero of World War II. Few in the building knew that it was happening at all, save for the medical staff who bustled to stabilize Steve in the medical bay, the New York headquarters site chief, and of course Nick Fury. Which was why Peggy was slightly surprised to find Agent Cassandra Kam waiting once the quinjet had touched down and she and Sharon had made their way to the sub-basement of the SHIELD facility where the medical staff was suited up and already at work.

“Please,” Cassandra snorted at Peggy’s dubious look. “I’m an officer of SHIELD, you think I can’t find these things out? Besides, I was going to find out eventually. If I am working on the down low on the Avengers, I would have figured out eventually that the guy from the 1940s was around.”

Peggy was too tired to argue the point, even if it was a good one made on the part of the one and only agent thus far assigned to her. If Maria Hill and Phil Coulson were Nick Fury’s right and left hands, Cassandra Kam was both of those for Peggy. Bright, quick thinking, a born investigator and able to pull all the threads of intelligence and data Peggy needed in this modern world, she wouldn’t have been ever able to function without her. Still, she would have rather waited, perhaps just a bit, to have her come into the madness that was Steve’s return.

“Besides, I was the one who told her,” Sharon admitted, not even looking a smidge guilty for it. “I needed backup handling you.”

“Handling me? For what?”

Sharon eyed her up and down, shaking her head. “You haven’t looked at yourself.”

Peggy felt slightly insulted by that. “And why should I?”

“Cause you look like hell,” Cassandra offered, brightly and unapologetically.

Peggy’s head throbbed at their pointed observations, but she ignored them. “I will take that under advisement.”

Sharon, unfortunately, was a Carter, and much like Peggy had a horrible tendency of taking over a situation. “Cassie, could we get a driver, maybe, get us to Peggy’s place. You can handle things for a day or two, right?”

Cassandra’s mouth was just forming the word “yes” when Peggy cut her off. “I’m perfectly fine! I just need a cup of coffee….maybe five. My bloody toes are still frozen, for God’s sake.”

“You aren’t fine,” Sharon snapped back, looking very much like how Peggy felt and glaring at her with the same sort of look Peggy’s mother used to give her when she was being obstinate as a child. “You’ve barely slept in three weeks, you look as if you may drop on the spot, and you know, a shower wouldn’t hurt you right about now.”

Peggy wasn’t going to take the childish bait on that last dig, but she did admit, she would murder her own niece for a nice, long, hot soak right about then. “I need to see that Captain Rogers gets settled.”

“You are no help there, Peggy!”

“Sharon’s right,” Cassie chimed in, arms crossed as she met Peggy’s glare, unperturbed. “Especially on the bath bit.”

“The two of you are joining forces on this?”

Sharon rolled her eyes. “What, do you want to fight us on this?”

Peggy was feeling more petulant than anything. “Yes!”

“We could take you,” Cassandra shot back with a confidence that perhaps should have given Peggy pause. “Well....Sharon could take you by herself, she’s an operative and you know, kicks ass. But I got enough skills to be a very good assist.”

In truth, Cassandra wasn’t wrong, Sharon could likely take Peggy in this state, but that was rather besides the point. “I need to be here.”

“Why?”

The resemblance between Sharon and her great-grandmother was growing and Peggy wasn’t having it. “It’s my responsibility, that’s why.”

Perhaps things would have broken out into a brawl then, in which, Peggy was fairly certain she would be in an undignified heap; too tired, sore, and emotionally exhausted to put up much of a fight. But, sadly, someone else on high had the temerity to intervene.

“Much as I would like to see Carter and Kam take you know, Director, I don’t think this is the time or the place. And besides, she’s right.”

Peggy grimaced, closing her eyes. She should have known. She did manage to pivot towards Nick Fury, however, who never failed to manage to look fearsome, from the pointed scowl in his expression to the dark eyepatch over his left eye. His good one flickered from her to Cassandra and Sharon behind her, then back.

“Not that I would ever discount you in a hand-to-hand fight, Carter, but I don’t think either of the other two would have to go too hard to take you out enough to get you in a bed.”

Peggy met his perturbed scowl with one of her own. “Because we all know how much I like to be handled in any situation.”

“I know better than that,” Fury shot back, glancing back to Cassandra and Sharon. “Agents, I’d like a word with the director. Kam, I want you to connect with Agent Coulson, I want you two working on ways to spin Captain Rogers’ discovery and recovery once he’s woken up. Carter, you get to rest up tonight but you are on a mission tomorrow. I have something special for you.”

As to what either woman thought of their marching orders, Peggy couldn’t say. They both nodded, quick to accede to Fury’s command. Sharon only paused long enough to glance towards Peggy, worry in her silent question.

“I’ll be fine,” she assured her with a tired, tight smile. “I will meet you at my place. Let Mr. Jarvis know I’ll be home presently.”

Sharon blessedly didn’t bother to question her as she nodded, turning to follow Cassandra out of the lab, both shooting furtive glances back at Peggy. For her part, she waited for Fury to get to his point. He wandered past her, tall and commanding in his all black clothes, watching the medical team for long moments as they went about their work.

“Greatest soldier of World War II,” he finally mused, coming to a stop, hands clasped behind his back. “Coulson is going to be beside himself, you know.”

Peggy had a feeling that Coulson would. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”

“I felt that if Captain Rogers were being brought back it was only fair for me to be here.”

“He’s not awake yet.” It was an obvious statement, but Peggy was feeling bone weary and childish and she there was a nagging part of her annoyed that Fury inserted himself into the situation.

“Any word yet on when he will be?”

“No,” she shot back, more sharply than she had intended. “This isn’t precisely a situation encountered before. Erskine’s data had not accounted for this, at least not that I remember.”

Fury’s only response was to nod and watch for long moments. The team had removed both Steve and the block of ice he was in to a table covered in warming lights, all meant to slowly defrost and warm him, the idea being they didn’t want to expose him to quickly to the air and pressure outside or expose anything else that might be trapped in the ice water with him. After that, it was a guessing game. No one...nothing was like this. Peggy had read, of course, of the several archaeological finds in places high up in the mountains of the Alps or the Andes, where the snow and ice had preserved the fossilized remains of someone who had been either put there or had fallen victim to some predator there. Steve was not one of those, however, the fossilized corpse of someone who lived long ago. He was living, breathing, alive...if they could just get him to wake up.

“We have a problem,” Fury finally spoke, turning his head to regard her. Peggy irrational mused that whenever he showed up to see her, it was usually because they had a problem.

“What is it?”

“Who else do you think? Malick has been agitating on the World Security Council again.”

Peggy’s pounding headache throbbed again. “You cut the Avengers on paper, no budget, nothing official. What is his complaint about?”

“He is pushing to prevent SHIELD from employing any so-called ‘super heroes’ for any consulting work or assistance in missions, citing that they are security risks, unknown variables who could jeopardize the integrity of SHIELD missions at home and abroad.”

“Bloody hell,” she swore, turning from the team and Steve, longing to kick something hard and finding nothing in the sterile environment. “What is his justification?”

“He doesn’t need much. Between Stark’s antics and Banner’s destruction of Harlem he’s arguing they are too dangerous to be used effectively and should be shut down and contained.”

Peggy glowered at Fury, knowing this wasn’t his argument, but unable to direct her ire at the real target. “Never mind the fact both of these men put themselves on the line to save people?”

“You got to admit Banner is more the troublesome variable he is leaning into. After Banner’s stunt at Culver University, then Harlem, he scared a lot of people.”

When it came down to it, Peggy couldn’t blame them. Banner’s uglier side scared her too. “Once we have Steve up, though...he always had the knack of bringing people just like that together, to bringing out the best in them.”

“He’s not here, yet, Carter. You are.” Fury’s one good, dark eye pinned her to the spot as he stalked towards her. “Do you think I gave you the Avengers, my brain child, the thing I had been working on for fifteen years, because I didn’t want it. You are Peggy Carter, the woman who founded SHIELD, the woman who saved Howard Stark’s ass, who took on Leviathan and won, who managed to figure out just who the war criminals were who were using her own brother, and still somehow managed to help wrangle in Rogers and his group of miscreants as they tramped through Europe. I’m sorry, but it seems to me that you did a lot of the running of this whole show even if no one else said you did.”

“I only did what I had to,” she replied, knowing he wasn’t wrong but feeling he was taking it horribly out of context.

Fury shrugged, glancing to the activity at the other end of the room. “Everyone knows Rogers was a legend. One of the greatest strategic and tactical minds we had in the war, but I can’t say that he was known for being much of a politician. That takes someone willing to do what is necessary - doing what they had to do - to get things done. That’s more your style, Carter.”

She blinked at him, too tired to formulate words, ruefully regretting that Sharon was right, she was exhausted. But then, so was Fury, for that matter, she was the one who did what was needed in any situation, even if it meant going against authority to do it. Sometimes, that was precisely what it took to achieve an end...or at least figuring out how to work around them to achieve an end. She had a feeling that was more towards Fury’s point, he couldn’t be seen being the one moving around the World Security Council and their edicts, but she could.

“What do you need me to do?”

“Malick has called a meeting of the sitting members of the council tomorrow at the UN. Secretary Pierce will be there, but I want you in on it too, at least making our case, even if it’s to convince them it’s smarter to at least have tabs on the likes of people like Stark and Banner. Malick isn’t going to buy it for one minute, but you can maybe convince the other members to at least agree to us continuing to monitor and work with the others, if nothing else as a safeguard in case something else blows up. Assure them that no one means any harm, this is all about security.”

It all made sense, for the most part, save the fact she was the one doing it. “Why me? Couldn’t you give this same speech?”

“I have, or tried to, but that’s the funny thing, I’m the Director of SHIELD. The World Security Council exists to be a pain in my ass.” His glower darkened perceptibly, speaking to just what his feelings on the body were. “You are different. Founder of SHIELD, war hero, somehow made it through time - they don’t know how, now you’ve found Rogers. You have a cache I don’t.”

“What, as a living, breathing legend?”

“Frankly, yeah.” Something lightened in his dark mood, even if only dimly perceptible. “I came up through the ranks the hard way, Carter. I don’t play their game. I’m an old soldier and spy, not some politician who sits in dark rooms smoking cigars and drinking aged brandy or port or whatever they do. That’s Pierce’s job. You on the other hand are something else entirely. They may listen to you.”

Peggy wasn’t so sure they would, but she could see why Fury would play that card. “And if they don’t?”

“Then we need to get them to listen somehow.”

Peggy wasn’t even sure she knew how to begin to do that.

“What time are they meeting?”

“Scheduled for two in the afternoon, which should give you time to get home and get some shut eye.”

Peggy couldn’t help either the mutinous desire to tell him no or the flicker of her gaze towards Steve. Fury clearly knew what she was thinking, however, and gave her the same sort of look Sharon had. “They know what they are doing Carter. He’ll be fine long enough for you to go home. He’s not going anywhere.”

Rationally, she knew that, but nothing about her life these past few years had been rational. “I want to be here when he wakes up.”

“Which won’t be tonight. Maybe not for several days. You want the man’s first sight of you after seventy years to be the way you look right now?”

What was left of her dignity was insulted by that. She pulled herself to her full height to glare at him. “And what exactly do I look like?”

Fury, unlike, say, Stark, was hardly cowed. “Like a bag of shit the cat dragged in. I would, too, after three weeks in the Arctic. Go home, Carter, rest or I’ll have agents sitting on you till you do. Kam would do it for me without me ordering it.”

She didn’t like it, she hated it as a matter of fact, but he unfortunately was right on many levels. She felt rather like she could curl up on the cold, tile floor and sleep for a million years. As much as she loved Steve, she needed a scalding bath, hot food, and a warm bed even more at this moment.

Fury clearly knew he won the argument. He spun on his heels to head for the door once again. “When you’re done, tell me how it went.”

Peggy noted, even in her sleepy state, he never tended to give Peggy orders as he did Cassandra and Sharon, only requests. Somehow, in that, it felt less like she was being dictated to and more as if they were equals. “Do you think they will listen to me?”

“Don’t know,” Fury admitted, glancing back briefly with his good eye. “But it doesn’t hurt. I got nothing else.”

And then he was gone, leaving Peggy alone with the team and Steve. She turned back to watch for several long moments, wanting to do...something. She wasn’t sure what.

“I’ll be back tomorrow,” she tried to assure him...or perhaps assure herself. For now, she simply wanted to warm up and sleep and pull herself together. She had found him, at least. Now, she had to fight to keep the Avengers, the entire reason she had come forward in the first place.

Not even her exhausted brain believed that was all of the reason she had come forward, she thought, as she turned weary steps towards home.


	7. Chapter 7

The last place Peggy wanted to be in was this meeting...such as it was.

Ignoring her decided lack of sleep and preparation, not to mention her thoughts wrapped up decidedly on Steve and not the Avengers, she had arrived at the United Nations’ campus promptly and looking as professional as she could manage under the circumstances. She had expected to have to face a panel of dour-faced men and women, all speaking for their respective countries, queerying her on why exactly SHIELD needed to have a special unit of super-powered individuals, several of whom were not precisely easily controlled.

She had the panel, all right...she supposed. She eyed the wall of monitors on the far wall, all eyeing her, and feeling distinctly like she was a bug under a microscope under investigation. It should have occurred to Peggy in this day and age of mass communication, with satellites and the internet that so many were addicted to, that things like meetings of groups as far flung and widespread as this World Security Council would be held with others remotely. But, at her core, she was still a woman from the 1940s, and so as she set herself up in her modern suit, with her notebook and pen, she couldn’t help but wish rather vaguely she was back in her own time, staring at a wall of men in suits and uniforms, rather than a wall of glass, the faces of the lone woman and the other men bearing down on her.

All, that was, save for two men: Alexander Pierce and Gideon Malick.

“Good afternoon, everyone.” Pierce sat at the head of the long conference table, shiny and black, the one that Peggy surmised the members gathered at when they were actually in New York. “I hope the call is finding you well?”

“Considering it is the middle of the night, well enough,” someone piped up from one screen, earning chuckles all around from the others. Peggy pulled the most polite of smiles in response, still feeling the ache of exhaustion from her own trip.

“I won’t keep you all that late, then.” Pierce graced them all with a benevolent smile. Peggy had met the Secretary of the World Security Council briefly months before, but she knew relatively little about him. Older and charming, he had the air about him of a man who had moved in the worlds of diplomacy, intelligence, and politics for many years. He had the charisma of an elder statesman, one that clearly this security council reacted well to, judging from chuckles and nods all around.

That was in stark contrast to the man who sat across from Peggy at the long table, Gideon Malick. Unlike Pierce, Malick was bluff, distant and cold, even when he greeted her. He was clearly of the school of interaction that said a man of his rank and status had to put up a particular aura of power around him, one that told the world that he was in charge. Peggy had seen many of his ilk over the years, from Senator Brandt to Obadiah Stane. At least that part about him was familiar enough. Of him personally, she knew even less, save that he was the reason she was there. She’d read up her briefing notes on him, hastily pulled together by Sharon and Cassandra the night before. He came from an old money family, at least what passed for old money in America, with the sort of connections in society that went with it. As his parents and his only brother had passed long ago, he had sole control over the family business and financial interests, all of which he maneuvered to ensure he had connections in the political realm. SHIELD seemed to be only another step along in this path. What his true objective was she couldn’t guess.

Pierce continued, shooting his broad, friendly, charming smile at Peggy. “I am sure all of you here of course know of Director Peggy Carter, if not by reputation, by the astonishing fact that she is sitting here.”

Peggy tried hard not to squirm, feeling all the eyes of the council turn on her curiously.

“As you know she has been handling several special projects on behalf of Nick Fury. As that is the subject of our conversation today, I thought it best to bring her in.”

“Good afternoon,” she murmured, politely, trying as she could to glance at all the monitors, finishing her scan on Malick’s impassive face. “I know the hour is late for some of you and I don’t want to keep you terribly late, so I’m happy to speak into whatever questions you have.”

“Director Carter,” the singular woman, Councilmember Hawley, spoke up. Peggy could hear the heavy influence of an elite education in her cadence, one not dissimilar to her own, but clearly played up for effect in this circle. “To say that we were all surprised to hear that you were not only alive but knocking on SHIELD’s door was a bit shocking.”

That was the sort of understatement that Peggy would have expected from the British councilmember. It earned her first, genuine smile. “Yes, well, no less shocking than for me to appear here in the 21st century.”

“You’ve clearly adapted well,” she pressed, a hint of curiosity beneath the smooth facade of her expression. “All things considered, of course.”

Peggy would have to be blind to miss the loaded meaning in the woman’s words. “I’ve had a great deal of help and lots of patient teachers. The idea of international wireless communication isn’t so strange to me as you might think. The particulars are perhaps different and a tad confusing, but the idea isn’t. That said, I perhaps could do without the idea of email, however, as that feels like a particular form of hell only this generation could think of.”

That earned a round of appreciative chuckles from most of the group...all except Malick, she noted.

A new voice, that of Councilmember Yen, spoke up. “Director Fury was the one who brought you SHIELD’s fold immediately, correct?”

Peggy didn’t want to point out to the man that she had been the one to give SHIELD its bloody name, for God’s sake, as she was sure he already knew that. This was a game with them, clearly, and she was being made to play it. “I believe that the able security of the New York SHIELD headquarters are who brought me in, but yes, Director Fury was who debriefed me.”

“And he offered you his Avengers Initiative just like that?”

“Perhaps no 'just like that',” Peggy hedged, seeing the disbelief on many of their mute expressions. “He did have to explain it to me, first.”

This quip didn’t land as funnily as her others had. Councilmember Yen arched a dark eyebrow dryly. “You have to admit that all of this is rather...well, forgive me, Miss Carter, this is all hard to believe and somewhat irresponsible, don’t you think?”

The point they clearly were all trying to make was clear. They didn’t trust Peggy to be who she said she was. What was more, they very much didn’t trust that Fury, on his first meeting with her, simply handed over the Avengers Initiative to her without much of a by your leave. In hindsight, it would look strange to anyone who hadn’t been there. It rather did look strange even to Peggy. In truth, she couldn’t fault this council for their skepticism, anyone in their right mind should be skeptical. It all sounded absolutely, barking mad. Had someone come to Peggy in 1949 claiming that they time traveled to get to her there, she would have thought them either insane or drunk. Though, in fairness, considering the many strange things she encountered working for the SSR, time travel was perhaps not totally outside of the realm of possibility.

“Councilmember Yen, if I may,” she spoke up, trying to put as much confidence and authority into her tone as she could. “In the last two years since my arrival in this time period, I’ve witnessed a robotic suit of unparalleled and breathtaking capability be built several times over by one of the world’s leading geniuses, Abraham Erskine’s serum being used by the United States Army to create mutated creations, and I have met several extraterrestrials who also happen to be the same Norse gods from mythology I learned about in school, and you are skeptical of the fact that within the next few years they figure out how to time travel?”

That set up a general rumbling among all of them. Clearly, the idea of time travel did not sit well with them. How could it? It was dangerous, to say the least, and a disruptive force that could threaten the world when this group was trying to ensure its survival. Through the rumble, however, deep, rough voice of Councilmemember Malik cut across the chatter.

“I believe what my colleagues are getting at, Miss Carter, and what no one wants to come out and directly say is that they don’t trust who you are.”

Peggy met his pointed but polite gaze mildly. “I do believe I understand that, Mr. Malick.”

“You have to believe that it is all rather...unusual. You appear out of nowhere from the past and then Fury hands you the Avengers Initiative, no questions asked.”

The optics weren’t perfect, no. Peggy hadn’t really considered in the time what that would mean for the Avengers or the World Security Council. Frankly, the idea that the director of SHIELD had to answer to this body was still strange, they hadn't existed when she had been in the position. That the entire fragile security of the world now rested on the shoulders of this group seemed frightening. Though, in fairness, she wasn’t sure she’d be more assured if it rested only on her shoulders...or Fury’s, for that matter.

Peggy improvised. “Given my experience during World War II with the Howling Commandos and later with SSR, Director Fury felt I had a unique set of qualifications that would lend itself to the task at hand.”

“All of which are legendary, Miss Carter,” Malick cut in, smoothly speaking over her. “But our concern is less in your skill but in this idea in the first place. Frankly, Nick Fury has been lobbying for it for years and only got it through because of his connections to others with sway in SHIELD.”

He didn’t have to say it, but Peggy knew he was lobbing a direct hit at Alexander Pierce sitting at the end of the table. Peggy would have to give it the man, Pierce sat, unruffled, quietly watching as Malick directly put Peggy in his crosshairs.

Peggy shrugged, eyeing Malick cooly from across the table. “May I ask what the objection is to the project?”

It was a simple shift, moving the focus from her to the Avengers, which was where Peggy wanted it to be, but it worked. Malick took the bait happily enough. “The idea that we are to hire so-called ‘superheroes’ to form a team and trust that this group will be on top of it all enough to protect the world.”

“That is the idea as I understand it, yes.”

Malick’s disdain was clearly showing. “And you don’t find this entire project problematic?”

“Only in the sense that it hasn’t been done before, at least not like this.”

“Oh, Miss Carter.” Malick’s condescension finally reared its ugly head. “You seriously have confidence in a team that so far only seems to be made up of a guilt-ridden, egotistical maniac out to rehab his own image and a mutated freak who can destroy a city any time he gets so much as a stubbed toe?”

Peggy felt her jaw clench, forcing up a smile so polite, Amanda Carter would have been proud. “You forgot to include the alien god who has sworn to protect the Earth.”

“Oh, yes, this Thor, who no one has seen since. Tell me, how is the search for Asgard going these days?”

“Doctor Foster is working on it,” Peggy assured him.

“Working, but not found. I’m sure her own interests might take up some of her time.” Malick leaned back in his chair, looking rather like the fat cat who knew he had captured his mouse. “I realize that SHIELD, and indeed the world owes a debt of gratitude to Peggy Carter, but I have to say that thus far the Avengers concept is rather a hot mess. Years of pouring money into this and what do we have for it? Three disasters in the last year alone, and this city has yet to recover from them. We are asked to believe that somehow you are going to make it all work when the chips are down?”

Peggy glanced towards Pierce’s impassive faced, frustrated he said nothing. “Mr. Malick, there are things out there in the world, threats that are bigger than just once person or one rogue state that threaten the wellbeing of the entire world. The idea of the Avengers is that we have these people who, whether we like it or not, have abilities that can be used and channeled for a greater good to protect the world. The tools are there already, they already exist, and as we have seen in both the cases of Mr. Stark and Mr. Banner, there are individual nations states who are interested in gaining access to their abilities and keep and use them for themselves. That is a threat we can’t have. With them under the SHIELD umbrella, they are both held by a global organization to be used for specific threats, and are kept from the hands of those who would seek either to profit from their abilities or use them towards their own personal ends, some of those ends being dangerous. Would you rather them be left to their own devices to run as vigilantes out there, free to do whatever they wished without oversight and guidance?”

It was perhaps a bit harsh of a pushback, but it was effective. Peggy could see several of the council members take note of her question to Malick, as did Pierce, who at least watched Malick curiously for his reaction. As for the man himself, his frown only deepened and he rather looked as if he had sucked on an entire lemon.

“Miss Carter, SHIELD already has plans in place to help protect itself from these outside threats, as you and Director Fury call them. These plans have been in place for years and are an outgrowth of other SHIELD projects and protocols, none of which include a rogue element of outsiders being brought under SHIELD's aegis to do anything.”

“I know that you have projects in development, though I’ve been informed they are top secret and, for whatever reason, off limits for me to know.”

“There is a reason for that,” Malick shot back.

“Really? I’d love to know what it is, seeing as I’m being dragged before you to answer for the Avengers as if it is the silliest idea in the world, but you’ve yet to provide any alternatives as to how the world can protect itself.”

Pierce spoke up, quietly, from his end of the table. “The council voted that those projects would only have the highest levels of clearance, a clearance you don’t have, Director.”

That had always baffled Peggy and she found herself flaring up at it. “And why not?”

“Because we aren’t sure that you are who you say you are,” Malick popped back, visibly irritated. It was enough to bring Peggy up short as she snapped her attention back to him. “You appear out of nowhere, you claim to be a long missing woman, you somehow manage to convince Fury you are who you say you are, and then you want top secret clearance?”

Peggy blinked, thinking of Natasha Romanoff, her hostility towards Peggy. She had said she had been put on Peggy’s detail to push her, to test her, because there were many ways to fake someone else, to play with a person’s mind and turn them into someone else. “I see...it’s not just the Avengers you don’t like.”

“Director Carter,” Councilmember Hawley cut in, gingerly, clearly trying to smooth over Malick’s bruskness, “you have to admit that all of this is...strange. I have seen your file, I have read Director Fury’s reports and Agent Romanoff’s assessments. We have no evidence that says you aren’t Margaret Carter. That said, if a SHIELD operative were gone for more than 24 hours without explanationI we would have them under protocols before allowing them back in the field, and certainly not with the clearance they once enjoyed until we were certain that it was safe. You were gone for sixty years, completely unaccounted for.”

Unlike Steve, she thought, bitterly, whose whereabouts had not changed in all of that time.

“I will admit,” she returned, quietly, “that there is a point to your concerns. They are not unfounded. That said, even if you have concern for me individually, what is stopping you from utilizing the Avengers Initiative. They are tools at your disposal, ones that can be valuable to you, and you refuse to even consider it.”

“They are dangerous and unpredictable,” one of the other councilmembers spoke up. Despite his cool, calm exterior, there was fear in his words and voice. “Stark alone is a menace, but then there is Banner. You have seen what happened with Emil Blonsky, and we want to recruit the likes of that thing to protect our planet?”

“Dr. Banner has multiple advanced degrees and is a perfectly reasonable human being,” Peggy defended him, knowing that wasn’t the point.

“Bruce Banner does, but the hulk he turns into doesn’t.” The council member glowered disapprovingly. “That is the part of him I am afraid of.”

“Besides,” spoke up someone else, “as Malick stated, we have other plans that were built and put into place for the sort of global threats that you want to use these Avengers for.”

“Such as?” Peggy arched a singular, questioning eyebrow at the wall of screens.

“SHIELD is well versed in terrorist threats of all kinds.”

“But not every threat is from on this earth,” she pushed back, recalling Thor and the giant, silver robot all too well.

“And we have planned for that eventuality too.”

“Have you?” Peggy glanced to Malick, sitting in smug silence in front of his compatriots. “Do you even know the threat you are facing out there?”

“The bigger question is, Miss Carter, is if you know the threat that is out there?”

He called her bluff.

“You keep insisting there is a threat that the Avengers are necessary for,” Malick continued, leaning on his forearms against the table. “You insisted to Fury the Earth was under threat. Can you tell this council, then, what sort of threat you are looking at?”

Peggy wanted to scream...because she couldn’t.

When Scott Lang had shown up on that cold, New Year’s Eve night two years before, he’d been insistent on bringing her forward, but not on giving her details. His plan had been to deposit her in January of 2012 - which was now two weeks away. His whole rational was that it was just before some alien invasion of New York, but he had said nothing of the details of the attack, by whom, or what it would look like. All the essentials she needed in this moment, this very moment, and she had none of them.

She stumbled, trying to find her voice. “I don’t have the details at this time.”

“And when will you get the details, Miss Carter? Soon, hopefully, as this is pending?”

She bit the inside of her cheek, counting to ten before she spoke. “You would rather discount a perfectly legitimate tool to stop anything that might be coming out of fear of it than to actually have it on hand just in case?”

“Considering Stark and Banner’s track records, yes.”

“I don’t know that we are all agreed there, Gideon,” Councilmember Hawley shot out, disapprovingly, at the back of Malick’s head. “After all, Director Carter has a point, with Stark and Banner under the control of SHIELD that gives us oversight over both, which means a measure of control over them.”

“Have you seriously ever met Tony Stark, Genevive?” Malick turned to regard her screen. “I’ve met the man. I knew his father back in the day, too. The Starks have as much regard for regulation and security as they do for human life - useful when it suits their interests, otherwise why bother if it makes them money.”

That was a patently false and unfair statement, and Peggy felt her temper rise, prepared to defend both Starks angrily, when Pierce stepped in, sensing the danger Malick had just put himself into. “Before we jump into personal attack on people who can’t defend themselves, are there any more questions you have for Director Carter?”

The council all blinked at her. In the end, it was Yen who spoke up, a hint of mild curiosity in his words. “If you were to get this team of yours off the ground, Director, how would you even control it?”

Peggy couldn’t help it. She thought of Steve being worked on even as they spoke. “I’d make them a team, Mr. Yen.”

Yen at least tried very hard not to look skeptical. “These aren’t people who play on teams.”

Peggy shook her head. “No, they aren’t, but that doesn’t mean I won’t do it. And I know the perfect man to lead them, once he’s woken up.”

She let her gaze flicker to Malick. The lack of surprise or curiosity there meant he knew she had found Steve. She decided to leave the matter at that.

“On that note,” Pierce murmured, calling the room to attention. “I believe we can release Director Carter before moving on to further discussion.”

Peggy was grabbing her things before the general hum of consent could sound. She didn’t bother looking at Malick as she packed her notebook and pen, grabbing her purse and briefcase to sling over one shoulder, her long, warm wool winter coat with the other. With nods in general to the council, she made her way from the room, even as Pierce was calling for a ten minute break.

She had made it most of the way down the carpeted hallway and into a grand lobby before Pierce finally caught up to her, calling her name softly across the small receiving area, with its elegantly upholstered, modern furniture and the walls of glass that overlooked the East River. Peggy turned on her heels, smiling politely at him.

“Mr. Secretary,” she greeted, slapping on the formal face she had developed while working for Phillips.

“Director,” he returned, somewhat wryly as he shot a glance back towards the direction they both came. “You did rather admirably back there.”

“Considering I was being accused of being some sort of plant within SHIELD, that I didn’t know what I was doing, and that the Avengers was a horrible idea and I was stupid to believe otherwise, I suppose I did.”

Pierce nodded with the sort of weary understanding a man in his position would have, dealing with these sorts of discussions everyday. “There is, as you can see, a great deal of trepidation regarding the Avengers Initiative.”

“Trepidation over the idea or worry that they can’t control them?”

“Both,” he shrugged, candidly. “Unlike a weapons system, humans with enhanced abilities aren’t as cut and dry.”

Peggy knew that and she also knew that in the end the only people she ever could trust were those humans. They were the ones willing to sacrifice everything for the greater good. “And where do you stand on that?”

A dry smile creased Pierce’s handsome, if craggy, face. “I would figure you’d be intelligent enough to figure that out, else Nick wouldn’t have put you in charge of all this.”

“The lone voice in the wilderness?” She nodded towards the council chambers in the distance. “They don’t seem to buy into it.”

“They are business people, politicians, inherently cautious.”

“And you aren’t?” She whipped back to regard him. “As I recall, you spent quite a bit of time in the US State Department.”

“That I did,” he admitted, shrugging as he wandered towards the broad, glass panel that looked out onto the river. Not far away, Peggy could spy Roosevelt Island - she had known it as Welfare Island, home to several hospitals, but now it was devoted to apartments and homes for those who lived and worked either in Queens or at the UN.

Peggy shifted her attention back to the secretary. “You don’t see things the same way they do, then?”

“How much do you know about the US State Department,” he asked, his smile crooked as he regarded the vista below. “Especially during the Cold War. It was insane. Any given day you could be putting out a military junta here, a planned terrorist attack there, then still have to have a long conversation with the Soviet premiere about why it was that threatening the United States with nuclear weapons as a negotiating tactic was perhaps a really bad idea.”

Peggy knew some of that life. “It sounds like a typical day running SHIELD.”

That earned a chuckle out of the man. “So I’ve heard. Was it that bad when you were in the role?”

“Well, I wasn’t in it for long,” Peggy paused, remembering those early days. “Most of what I spent my time doing was negotiating with money, space, people, manpower, all the while trying to ensure that the US and the Soviets didn’t try to kill each other in the bargain, while everyone and anyone was looked at funny for even so much as mentioning the word ‘communist’.”

“I vaguely remember those days.” He squinted into the distance, as if looking back into history. “I was young, but I do remember some of it. Funny, in the end it wasn’t the communists who were as much the threat as the businessmen and politicians.”

Peggy snorted, just managing not to look back towards the council chambers. “I won’t deny they do tend to make it all a bit more difficult.”

He hummed, thoughtfully, quiet for several long moments before speaking. “I’m not going to lie, there are days when I wish it were a bit more simple.”

It was a sentiment that Peggy had heard out of many leaders, even Harry Truman at one point. “Don’t we all?”

“I suppose. The world seemed much more simple in your era.”

That made Peggy laugh outright. “Oh, it wasn’t, believe me. The war was...anything but simple, especially living in Britain. When it started, we were all by ourselves, terrified of invasion, cut off from everything, unsure if America would even throw its hat in the ring. There were so many moments when it felt as if it would all fall apart at the seams and end in disaster.”

“And it didn’t, despite the politicians and businessmen.”

“Mmm, well, most American businessmen at the time weren’t Howard Stark.” Few had jumped on the idea of throwing their ring into the war when America was so adamantly against it. Howard had been impossibly young, only in his early twenties, and trying to get his company off the ground and was willing to take the risk. He was just mad enough to give it a try and impetuous enough to not see how he could fail. It paid off in dividends for him.

“Having known Howard Stark, no, most weren’t,” Pierce agreed. “He was willing to take risks. The World Security Council isn’t.”

Peggy could only sigh, a long exhalation of all her pent up exhaustion and frustration. “No, they aren’t. Particularly not Malick.”

“Ahh, Gideon.” There was a wealth of things unsaid in that exclamation. “He had his sights set on my position, you know.”

“I may have heard something of it.”

“Then you know why he’s pushing so hard on this. He is positioning himself as the calm and responsible choice, the one with rational solutions to real and actual problems, not supposed threats using dubious methods.”

“I could see he is marshalling the council jointly against Fury’s plan. I am guessing he is also trying to use this as leverage to oust you?”

“Mmm, trying being the operative word,” Pierce shrugged, a careless gesture in comparison to the concern etched on his lined face. “Gideon Malick doesn’t like to see problems that aren’t in front of his face. He is conservative and cautious, which makes him reactionary to threats that come out of the blue. Laying down a plan with multiple contingencies designed to address various threat analysis or even thinking outside of the box in terms of making a play that could save lives is not in his way of operating. Malick likes to have the specific tool to do the job at all times, and doesn’t see the point of doing anything differently, of moving outside of the rules of engagement.”

Peggy listened, carefully mulling over Pierce’s words, not to mention the stand off she just had with him. “He needs proof before he is willing to approve of any of this.”

“Or at least the council does.”

Peggy was beginning to see why Pierce and Fury were friends. “I am beginning to see why you are the Secretary of the World Security Council and he is not.”

“Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to pat myself too hard on the back. There was still quite a bit of glad handing behind the scenes.”

“Isn’t there always?” Peggy had to do a bit of it as the head of SHIELD as well. “Pity not everything in life can work on just honor and honesty upfront.”

“No,” he admitted with a self-deprecating grin. “It is a pity. Not like the days of Captain America, you know.”

She paused, staring at him as he nonchalantly shrugged. Of course he would know, likely the whole council did, but still it caught Peggy up short, the secret of Steve’s discovery being known to someone she hadn’t shared it with. 

Pierce himself seemed more curious than anything. “You found him?”

“Yes,” she replied, simply, her feelings too close to the surface to delve much beyond that.

“I’m glad,” he smiled, something boyish shining there for a moment. “You know, I was a kid during the war. Outside of my father, Steve Rogers was my biggest hero. I watched every one of his movies.”

“Did you?” Peggy was trying, and failing, to imagine the confident, knowing older gentleman before her as a small boy in her past, with a love of Captain America and a comic book in his grubby hands.

“Oh, yes,” he laughed outright, clearly in fond remembrance. “I had toys and comics...even had some of his cards. Few of those survived through the years, but what I had I sold to Agent Coulson for his collection three or four years ago.”

“I am sure he was thrilled with that.” Peggy well knew that Coulson had long looked up to Steve. “Steve always was vaguely bemused by all the fuss.”

Bemused was a word for it. Every time someone would bring it up...usually Dugan or Morita...Steve looked like he wished the earth would open up underneath him. Fame was not something Steve really understood or liked, not like Howard. Perhaps it was fitting, then, he would wake up in this world where he was remembered only as a legend, where the average person on the street wouldn't necessarily look at him and remember that he was once one of the faces of the US effort in World War II.

Pierce continued, oblivious to Peggy’s trek down memory lane. “When he is awake, I hope I can meet him. I know there are many who would look forward to seeing him.”

“When he’s awake,” Peggy replied, simply, unsure of even when that would be. “It will be some time, judging by what the medical experts have to say.”

Pierce seemed to understand. “He’s come through a lot more than this, Director. I’m fairly certain he will make it through all right.”

Peggy could have laughed outright at that. “The one thing I learned long ago about Steve Rogers, Mr. Secretary, is never to underestimate him. The idiot will pull himself through anything, just because he’s stubborn enough to do it.”

With that parting shot, she waved a farewell, Pierce laughing outright behind her.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peggy goes to visit a comatose Steve.

“Where is Jane Foster now?” Peggy threw the question at Cassandra as she wandered by the agent's office door.

Cassandra, caught by surprise, popped up to follow Peggy. “Err, still in New Mexico, I believe. Why?”

“Think we could get her out here at some point in the next few days?”

“Possibly? Why?”

“I need to prove a point,” Peggy huffed, mind whirling frantically. How could she even begin to prove Lang's assertions when she didn't know what she was looking for? “Get her a set up here in the labs, I will need her on a project.”

Cassandra nodded, thinking. “Under the radar, I am presuming.”

Peggy blinked at her somewhat blankly.

“Under the radar because the World Security Council is trying to tank the Avengers.”

“Yes,” Peggy nodded, frowning. “Perhaps she and Coulson could travel together. When is he coming in?”

“He hasn’t said, he’s still working on that project with Erik Selvig. He said he would get back to me.”

Peggy frowned, recalling Malick’s words about other projects, more reliable means of protection. “When he gets here I’d love to chat, get his perspective.”

“Sure,” Cassandra affirmed, as always taking meticulous notes. “Any luck with the council on the Avengers, by any chance?”

“No,” Peggy snapped, digging through her briefcase for her things, her fingers stopping on something round and metallic. She closed them around it, pausing...Steve’s compass.

“Just wondering in case I have to move divisions or look for another job,” Cassandra muttered, understandably so. This entire scenario had not been what she had signed up for. It hit Peggy, then, just how many other people outside of herself would be affected by the power plays ensuing between Gideon Malick and Alexander Pierce. It wasn’t as simple as herself and Nick Fury, it was Cassandra, Jane Foster, Tony Stark, people she had made various promises to. Now she wondered if she would even get a chance to keep them.

Hadn’t she learned before not to make promises she couldn’t keep?

“So far, we are still, officially, off the books. Until I can prove that the Avengers are more than just a whim of Nicholas Fury’s imagination, that is where we are at.”

“Right,” Cassandra replied, few questions asked. Peggy adored Cassandra for that. She had met the agent on one of her first days in this new century, the requisition officer who had shown Peggy to her the spacious flat SHIELD had assigned her. Cassandra had held her hand as she acclimated to her new time and new home, teaching her how to use her phone, giving Peggy her own number to call if she wanted company, spending lunches with her and ultimately working with Peggy as she tried to get to the bottom of the Tony Stark kidnapping. She was an invaluable asset and it pained Peggy to think of the idea she might have to move away from this work, back to her old position. She’d chosen Cassandra because she was good at what she did, because she liked the challenge of it. To have it all taken away would feel like she was letting the woman down.

“Whatever it takes, Cassandra, I’ll make sure we keep this afloat. I wouldn’t have fought this hard for it if I didn’t believe I could.”

The words at least were reassuring in the moment. “I know, it’s why I stick around.”

“It isn’t my witty banter and my old-time war stories,” Peggy quipped, pulling out Steve’s compass and setting it aside as she finished setting up her things.

“Those are entertaining, and you know, I get all the crazy storiesto tell David as well.”

“How is David, by the way,” Peggy politely inquired, if nothing else to shift the subject away from the situation causing her the most headache at the moment. David was Cassandra’s fiance, a United States federal lawyer as Peggy recalled, a handsome and pleasant fellow in that modern, well-educated, Manhattan sort of way. Peggy had met him a time or two. He seemed normal and charming enough, quiet next to the more engaging Cassandra, but that was really where all impressions of him stopped. She knew that he and Cassandra had been together for years, that his parents disliked Cassandra, and that talk had swirled of the two of them marrying. They were, in short, a sweet and nice couple, and as far as Peggy was concerned she would do her utmost to ensure that Cassandra would still be employed and still be able to go home to him every night.

“He’s fine, busy with a big Roxxon case at the moment.” Cassandra leaned against the front of Peggy’s desk. “Working on the large oil spill case.”

Peggy recalled the case and the scandal from it. That had been shortly after she had first arrived. “How is that going?”

“Hard to say. He can’t discuss details and I’m guessing there is politics involved.”

Peggy thought of Malick and sighed. “Isn’t there always?”

“Mmm,” Cassandra hummed, deftly reaching across to point to the compass by Peggy’s right hand. “So...what’s that?”

Peggy glanced at it, cringing, if nothing else out of embarrassment for being so horribly obvious. “A compass.”

“For?”

“To keep with me?”

“In case you get lost on the subway from Lincoln Square?”

“No,” she sighed, knowing Cassandra, with her inquisitive nature, was going to keep asking till she got an answer. She passed it over the desk.

Cassandra picking it up to study it, briefly, before opening it up, delight lighting up her face. “Is that you?”

“Mmm, yes.” Peggy could feel her cheeks flushing with heat as she tried to busy herself with opening her computer and pulling out notes.

“You look stunning in this!”

“As opposed to…”

“Well...I stand by what I said yesterday, you look like hell.”

Peggy rolled her eyes. “Thanks.”

“I say it in love. Maybe you should go home, get more sleep.”

Peggy only grunted and wished she hadn’t said anything at all.

Cassandra studied the compass briefly, fingering the picture inside before closing it with a soft snap. “This is his, isn’t it?”

“Steve’s? Yes.” Her response was simple. Perhaps because she spent so much of the last three weeks crying and falling apart. She didn't think she had any tears left.

Cassandra passed the compass back, her expression soft, torn between heartache and empathy. “You two are like one of those old timey love stories they like to make epic romances about.”

Peggy wasn’t sure she knew what one of those was. “I don’t think anyone would accuse either of us as that.”

“I don’t know, he kept your picture in his compass. And I will bet all of my next paycheck you have a picture of him somewhere as well.”

“With insight like that, Agent Kam, you can buy me lunch for the next month.”

“Peggy,” she sighed, exasperated. “What are you doing up here in the office?”

“Trying to work.”

“Go downstairs and be with him.” Cassandra reached across to snatch the pen out of Peggy’s fingers. Peggy glared at her, but Cassandra only met it with her own, level glare, unapologetic and stubborn.

“I can’t...hover over him every minute of every day, like some schoolgirl.” Peggy hadn’t done it in the war, she wasn’t about to do it now.

“No, but you can check on him. Besides, I went down earlier, they were running the MRI and tests on him, seeing what was going on.”

Peggy nodded, blood suddenly running slightly cold. They of course would do a work up to see what the serum was and wasn’t doing. “I’ll just go down there for a few minutes.”

“See, not so hard,” Cassandra teased, her smile moving towards concern quickly. “Peggy, no one would fault you for spending time there, being with him. If it were David, I’d be a wreck...by his bedside all the time, not eating, not sleeping, crying everywhere.”

Peggy suspected that if it were in her shoes Cassandra, she would do just that and Peggy would be the one gently trying to pry her away to sleep, rest and eat. “There is a difference, though. I thought mine had died. I spent years mourning him already.”

“All the more reason you should go down there and spend some time with him.”

Peggy had to admit Cassandra had a point. “Right, well, get Foster out here with Coulson if you can. I am sure Barton can hold the fort down for Coulson till he gets back. Has anyone heard from Romanoff?”

“Not since she went to India tracking Banner. She might be elsewhere deep on another case.”

Peggy nodded. “I just wanted to see if she had any updates. I am assuming Banner is still safe and sound.”

“From what she said he seems to be fine. He's doing medical work in the slums there, low profile, but good work all the same.”

Peggy rose, plucking up Steve’s compass to put into her pocket. “Make sure we get some medical supplies to him through the regular channels. Don’t want him having to resort to anything extreme to get what he needs.”

“Can do. Anything else?”

Peggy rounded her desk to the door, considering. “Yes, look into Scott Lang. He lives in San Francisco. See what he’s up to at the moment.”

Cassandra took note of it. “Got it!”

“I’ll be downstairs for a bit,” Peggy said, unnecessarily, frankly, since Cassandra was the one who ordered her down. Perhaps it was more to reassure herself.

The lift opened and Peggy stepped inside. “G3 please.”

“G3 Clearance: Welcome, Director Carter.”

“Thank you,” she murmured, more out of habit than anything. All of SHIELD’s offices were equipped with artificial intelligence systems that kept the complex web of computers and security systems functioning. Her own apartment building had one. When she first encountered them two years before, she had been amazed that anyone could have created the idea of an artificial intelligence, a machine that could think. Now, it was a commonplace background piece of her life, like the computer, the cellular phone, and the giant, digital screens a few blocks away in Time Square. 

Still, the bland, female-sounding voice was just part of the hum of the building, a piece of the functionality of it. It lacked the warmth and humor, she thought, of JARVIS. He’d been installed in her own home just before she had raced up to the Arctic to find Steve. Peggy had hardly had a chance to say hello to him the night before when she had fallen into bed and had barely said good morning when she’d pulled herself out of bed for the meeting today. 

What must JARVIS be thinking.

For not the first time since encountering Tony Stark’s AI, she realized she tended to think of the program as a person...one with the face and build, perhaps, of the real man he was based off of long ago. It was a horrible habit, she knew, and Stark would scold her for it, but it was how her brain rationalized it, she supposed. It was less mad then talking to her ceiling all day...which was what she was doing anyway, she supposed.

The doors opened to the requested floor. Sunk far below the SHIELD offices, deep into the bedrock of the city, were the various research labs and medical facilities used in the SHIELD New York offices. Most were empty for the moment, but one had lights on, with personnel wandering in and out. Peggy moved to the automatic doors, which opened for her, she assumed using the same face recognition technology the lift had.

Inside, the room was filled with all manner of computers and monitors, with more displays and numbers than she could possibly understand. Around her a bevvy of medical personnel wandered, looking at said screens, chatting together, a couple turning to watch Peggy curiously. None stopped her as she smiled, hesitantly, walking past them all to move towards the strange pod at the end of the room.

It looked less like a pod and more like a cylinder of glass that had been sliced in half and set down on a table. On the edges where the glass met the metal frame holding it together, crystals of frost gathered, a spiderweb of delicate ice, indicating the temperature inside. Laying on the padded surface was Steve, still in his uniform, unmoving and still, but free at last of the oppressive prison that had captured him for 60 years. His dear face still looked bloated and swollen. Now free of ice, she could see the horrible, purple blotching all along the surface, the cuts and abrasions that had been hidden by the distortion of the ice. What wasn’t mottled with injury still had a ghastly, blue-gray tinge to it, more corpse than living body.

Any other man would be dead...should be dead...but he wasn't dead, that much she knew, but still, the way he looked.... 

“Director!” The voice at her elbow caused her to spin. She jumped and turned to the smiling face of Dr. Young.

“Doctor, hello! How is the patient today?”

“Well, free of the ice,” she responded, clearly pleased with that much progress, “We are keeping him in cryogenic stasis for now, at least until we can figure out how to begin the process of reviving him and bringing his body up to standard temperature. We are studying it, but...it will take some time.”

“Time?” Peggy frowned, glancing down at Steve’s bruised and broken face. His long, dark lashes fanned across his upper cheeks bones. Tiny, crystalline flakes of frost had formed, like tiny snowflakes. She wished in the moment she could dust them off.

“Well, yes, we are pouring through all the data we have from Dr. Erskine and Howard Stark. There isn’t much, honestly, but we are parsing through what we have to figure out if that gives us any clues.”

Peggy could only nod, resting a hand on the cold glass of Steve’s chamber. “Do we know yet how the serum helped him survive.”

“No...still running tests. Honestly, it will be a few days before we get that information.”

Of course, Peggy reminded herself. Steve had been home for less than 24 hours, hardly enough time to piece together all the strange details of how he managed to survive something no one else should. “My apologies just...impatient I suppose.”

Dr. Young at least was compassionate enough to understand. “It’s quite alright, I suppose I get it. I’d want answers too if it were me.”

“Agent Kam said you ran MRI scans, I believe? Tests on his body to see what damage he sustained.” Peggy vaguely understood that MRIs worked in much the same fashion as X-rays before, only more in depth in terms of what they could see.

“Yes, this morning. It’s standard protocol.” She bustled over to a computer, Peggy following in her wake. With a few keystrokes at the keyboard, she pulled up images onto several monitors, strange, ghostly shapes of a body...Steve’s body. They were images of him she had never seen before, of how his structure had changed post serum and what damage had been done on the _Valkyrie’s_ impact.

“Honestly, I could study these for days,” Dr. Young murmured, appreciatively, though not in a way most women did. “You can see signs of how the serum affected his growth! The old bone structure overlaid with the new build up, the tears and repairs of the rapid cellular growth. He was a slight man when he took the serum, wasn’t he?”

“Very,” Peggy confirmed, the memory of Steve, scrawny and underweight, trying to punch a bag with all of his meager might, still fresh in her mind.

_You don’t think I can do it, do you?_

“He was shorter than I back then,” Peggy continued, smiling. “Small enough a stiff wind could have blown him away.”

“That is crazy to believe,” Dr. Young murmured, eyeing the images through her thick lenses, shaking her head. “The thing is, save for the injuries from the crash, he looks like he’s an Olympic athlete in peak condition, no more than I’d say 22 at most. How old is he?”

“Twenty-seven when he crashed.”

“Jesus, I wish I could look this good after taking a serum.” Dr. Young, it must be said, was a rather short, soft woman, round faced and round hipped, her mousy hair cut in a short, pixie style that more framed the roundness than enhanced it. 

Still, Peggy knew well the all too human trait of assuming the grass is always greener on the other side. “You know, the serum only brought out what was the truest inside of everyone. You have many good qualities all on your own.”

The scientist glanced at her in surprise, faint pink on her cheeks. “Errr...thank you. I mean, I’m glad you think so, though, admittedly, I was mostly just wishing I could move like I was 22 and not complain loudly getting out of bed in the morning. Anyway, we found the areas of most damage. Much of it is pretty extensive, consistent with the sort of crash he had - head and brain injuries, spinal injuries, multiple breaks on the clavicle, broken ulna and radius on both forearms, fractures on both of his femurs, lacerations all over and severe hematomas. What concerns us the most, of course, are the head and spine injuries.”

She used a finger to swipe across the screen, pulling up the dim silhouettes of Steve’s skull and spine. “The skull is fragmented in several places, indicating he hit something when he was thrown, but it at least didn’t break through or crush it, which is good. There are signs of some bruising on the brain’s surface, had he not been frozen so quickly there might even be swelling, which wouldn’t be good with that many fractures. Frankly, it is good that he froze so quickly, it means that bleeding from any one of those was kept minimal as his circulatory system slowed down. What that means for him...we don’t know till he wakes up. With the serum, it might mean relatively little, but we have little data to go on. His spine has a series of fractures from his C1 to his T1, small ones but indicating he hit something hard headfirst. We’ve stabilized those, but honestly, the serum will fix all of this quickly once he’s brought up to the proper core temperature, or so I am guessing.”

“Guessing,” Peggy whispered, faintly.

The biochemist nodded, at least not shying away from the truth. “Honestly, Director, we haven’t dealt with this before. Captain Rogers was a miracle even in your own time. He was never recreated or duplicated. We don’t have a lot of other data to go on.”

She was right and it was all very fair. “Do you hope to have a treatment plan soon?”

“Yes,” she nodded, glancing towards Steve’s unmoving form. “Hopefully by the New Year. Once we have that, we will see. Our biggest concern is just in getting him to the point where his body awakens once more. Once his system wakes up a bit, perhaps the serum will start the process of healing. It will likely take longer than he normally would have, given the extent of his injuries. We don’t know if we can even medically sedate him to allow for healing or not.”

That was the giant question mark in all of this. So much of Steve’s physiology was a giant question mark. For not the first time Peggy cursed the HYDRA agent who took Erskine’s life and took away all of Erskine’s knowledge. “Of course keep me informed of developments.”

“Absolutely,” Dr. Young assured her, professionalism softening as she glanced at Steve’s pod. “You know, you can come down and visit him anytime you want. I mean...so far his brain waves have been minimal, and maybe he can hear, maybe not, but perhaps it is like with coma patients, they can hear you. I don’t know. But even if he can’t, I think it will comfort him later to know you came.”

As if wild horses could keep Peggy away. Still, she appreciated that the woman said it. It did make Peggy feel much less shy about it. “Thank you.”

“Of course. I’ll just let the team know. You are welcome, any time of day or night.”

Peggy had a feeling that was likely going to be the case, at least until he woke up. She hoped that would be soon. She had a feeling the world would need him very badly very soon...if only she could figure out just what this impending threat would look like...or when.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peggy reconnects with people.

“So...the Avengers Initiative is dead?”

Peggy sighed, really wishing this entire scenario wasn’t so bloody complicated.

“Not exactly,” she hedged, trying to find a way to explain it to Jane Foster that didn’t sound as ridiculous as it was.

“Well it sounds like that’s what you just said, given the story you told us.”

In fairness, Peggy was sure that was precisely how it sounded to Dr. Foster. A woman of facts and figures, reading between the lines wasn’t precisely her forte...though, in fairness, she was the one who managed to break an alien god out of a SHIELD facility. Still, it hadn’t precisely been a good lie to get Thor out. Coulson had seen right through it.

“I believe Director Carter was laying out more of the complications of the matter,” Coulson offered, mildly, in the imitable way he had. She wondered if anything ever truly ruffled his calm exterior. She was sure it did and there was a childish part of Peggy that wanted to see that, just because.

Blessedly it was Darcy Lewis, of all people, who seemed to cut through the chatter of the whole thing to break it down in a way that Foster would understand. “So, it’s like at school, you have all these politics over your head. Director Carter is like your department chair, she’s fighting to keep your department open and get you money. This Fury guy is like the dean trying to get the board to give him money for his projects, but the board is all ‘we do what we want, so you have to shut it and take it.’ Meanwhile, all you want to do is your research, but they want to know what your research is, and how you spend your money, and do you really need to expense that much cereal, I mean, there are other healthy alternatives for breakfast.”

Peggy was learning that it was not unusual for Jane Foster’s...intern...assistant...she wasn’t sure what Darcy’s official title working for the astrophysicist was...to make a pronouncement like this that was both completely unrelated to the topic at hand and deeply profound. She wondered, briefly, if the young woman had completed her studies at Culver University, and if so, if she shouldn’t be hired by SHIELD.

At the moment, Foster looked as if she would give Darcy to Peggy free of charge. “Yeah, thanks, I got the idea,” she muttered, glaring at her protege. “All right, so there is politics involved. What does that mean for me and my research, which you promised SHIELD would fund?”

“That hasn’t changed,” Peggy assured her, hoping that she could still say that with confidence in a few weeks. “SHIELD is interested in you and your work, even if it doesn’t end up being for the Avengers Initiative.”

That mollified her somewhat, knowing that no matter the politics she still had a source of funding for the work she wanted to do. “And so...what is this thing you want me to do?”

Peggy sighed. She knew this next piece would sound mad. It sounded insane to her own ears and she had lived it. “In the next six months, I am guessing, there will be a threat to this city, this world, really, from an extraterrestrial entity. I don’t know any more details than that, save that it will target New York.”

Foster blinked wide, doe-like brown eyes at her. “Excuse me, what?”

“Alien invasion,” Peggy tried hard not to chew on her own tongue, already frustrated with all of this, not necessarily Foster’s obtuseness...though, that wasn’t precisely helping. “I know that there is a moment coming soon where this will happen, but that’s all I know. And I need to prove somehow that not only is it happening but this is WHY we need the Avengers. This is the exact sort of threat the Avengers were always meant for, because no one government, not even SHIELD, has the sort of ability to handle something on this scale.”

Foster’s eyes were saucers in her angular face, blinking for long moments before she spoke with quiet worry. “Are you so sure that these Avengers do have that ability?”

In fairness, no...Peggy wasn’t.

“I don’t know, Tony Stark took out a whole army of robot drones and some crazy Russian dude in a metal suit,” Darcy opined, twirling a long strand of her shiny, dark hair around one finger. “And there is that Hulk dude. I mean, he tore Harlem the hell up!”

“That’s not the point,” Foster snapped, fear underlying her frustration. “You remember last spring, that little toy that Loki sent in to kill Thor? That was one thing, one alien weapon, and it leveled the town! Imagine an army of these things!”

“Which is all the more reason we need to know what is coming,” Peggy offered, glancing over to Coulson, who nodded in agreement. She knew he was all in on the scheme. “Do you have any idea on what we could be using?”

Foster shrugged, fear shifting to thoughtfulness as she mulled the idea over for several moments. “I mean, not much, honestly. The Hubble Telescope and some other deep space scanning projects, sure, but they don’t have the sort of range that can see with any sort of clarity, and that’s just seeing what’s close to us. Thor proved that travel between space using wormholes - Einstein-Rosen Bridges - is possible. The Asgardians clearly have a means of doing it with regularity...though, apparently that system seems to be broken now!”

Despite his promises to Foster, not to mention to SHIELD, the Asgardian god had yet to make an appearance back on Earth. Peggy was rather regretting now that he hadn’t. Thor's expertise and knowledge of just what lay beyond the stars was sorely needed right now. “So what you are saying is that there could be cultures, civilizations far, far away from us who might target us and we would never know about it because we don’t have the capability to utilize these wormholes.”

“Pretty much,” Foster crossed her arms as she leaned her slight form back in her chair. “I mean, unless SHIELD has some sort of secret, giant satellite no one else has access to, I’m not sure how far I can get with the technology I have at hand.”

Peggy glanced towards Coulson who shook his head, though a look of careful thoughtfulness did flicker, briefly. “I mean, SHIELD does have secret, giant satellites, but none that do what you want. But I am betting that SWORD might.”

Peggy literally did stutter at that name, pausing in mid sip from a bottle of water to blink in consternation at Coulson. “Excuse me, what?”

Foster seemed to know what he was talking about. “They likely would, but they don’t just let anyone in there, you know. I tried applying there as soon as I finished my doctoral work and they wouldn’t even give me an interview. I had recommendations from all my professors and from Erik too, and they wouldn’t even give me a glance!”

“Which speaks loads to their taste, clearly,” Darcy piped up, fiercely, before stopping herself. “I mean, that they are idiots for not looking at you, not that they are smart for not….because they should have!”

Peggy felt the need to break in then, if nothing else to pull the reins back in before it went too far off the rails. “Could we perhaps back this up a bit and review...what is SWORD?”

All three of them turned to stare at Peggy in surprise as if she should just know this information. Perhaps she should, she ruminated, considering all the everyday things that everyone else in this world knew and she didn’t. She hadn’t explained to Foster or her intern the truth of her backstory, at least not yet, so one could perhaps pardon them for their matching frowns of bemused confusion. After all, how were they to know there were huge swaths of culture Peggy had missed out on? But Coulson knew better, and she could see him grappling for a way to explain it without delving into Peggy’s time traveling past.

“Errr...well, SWORD stands for ‘Sentient World Observation and Response Division’. It is an extra-government organization that was formed fifteen years ago out of a joint project between SHIELD, the UN, the US Military, NASA…”

“Well, every international space agency, really,” Foster qualified.”

Coulson ignored her. “In order to foster a global effort towards the exploration of space. The public guiding principle, of course, was that SWORD would foster further research and discovery of the stars, but off the books, SWORD has always been something of an intelligence and security division, looking for interstellar opportunities and threats...like the Asgardians.”

“Clearly, they aren’t good at it, considering what happened in New Mexico,” Darcy added with some acerbity.

“Basically, they are SHIELD in space,” Foster quipped, grinning. “I always felt someone went to great lengths to make the acronym ‘sword’. Sword...shield...it’s kind of funny when you think about it.”

“Funny how that works,” Coulson shrugged, gamely, deliberately avoiding Peggy's eye. “In any case, they likely are the first place you should look. If there is anyone on Earth who would know anything, it’s them, but I don’t know how much that is.”

Peggy was still reeling from the fact that such a group existed. “So they are connected to SHIELD?”

“Not exactly,” Coulson qualified. “They are their own entity, own charter, everything, but SHIELD played a huge role in helping them get off the ground. I know the director fairly well, I could put a call into her and see if we can get Foster set up, though she may want details from you first.”

“I’ll happily speak with her if it gets us access.” Peggy glanced at Foster. “That is if you are willing to be the point person on this.”

“Gladly,” Foster nodded, looking as if she were a child just being offered a trip to the sweet shop. “I mean, I’ve always wanted to see what SWORD had. They are so top secret.”

“SWORD has a lot of secrets to keep,” Coulson added, vaguely. Peggy made a note to shake him down for more information later.

“Despite the secrets, we will see if they are willing to work with Dr. Foster and her...what is Ms. Lewis doing with you again?”

“Oh, well, Darcy is still interning for me, so I brought her along.” Foster blushed, biting her lip. “I suppose I should have asked before dragging her to a top secret meeting at SHIELD.”

“Not precisely top secret if I was there when you two were talking about Avengers and everything last spring,” Darcy replied, so sweetly it could only be in sarcasm. “And besides, I’m applying to grad schools soon, in astrophysics, and since I pretty much didn’t have any of that in my undergrad degree, hanging with SHIELD and doing the science thing gives me points in getting in!”

Foster smiled in that beatific way that proud mothers always had when speaking of their child’s accomplishments. “Darcy has a gift with the tech, what can I say? I wouldn’t have been able to have most of my lab if she wasn’t, and she’s not bad at the physics piece, either.”

Foster’s compliment clearly moved her acerbic and often sarcastic intern. The girl’s well-painted mouth wobbled into a watery smile. “Oh, Jane! I think that’s the nicest thing you ever said! Not as nice as that letter of recommendation would be, but still…”

“Ms. Lewis,” Peggy interrupted, before the two women could get too beyond the conversation. “I will personally write you a letter of recommendation to the university of your choice for your graduate work should you prove help in this, but I feel I must point out that Dr. Foster is on the SHIELD payroll, you are not. I am sure that there is something you will have to sign to ensure that you keep what you see and hear secret, but I will ask that while you work with Dr. Foster you adhere to the classification you are assigned.”

It hit both women, then, the precarious position that Darcy was in. She may have been Jane’s long time assistant, but Jane worked for SHIELD now, while Darcy did not. They both sobered, nodding, with Darcy speaking up. “Sure, yeah...I mean, of course, I’ll happily sign. And sure, any help you could give me, I’d appreciate it.”

“Thank you, both. Agent Coulson, if you could connect with SWORD and we will go from there. I will make sure that Agent Kam sees to your accommodations while you are in town.”

“Ahh, well...on that…” Foster flushed, glancing to Darcy, who nodded firmly and encouragingly, shooting not so subtle, pointed looks towards Peggy. “Well, you see, Christmas is next week and…”

“My mother expects me back in Pennsylvania, underneath the Christmas tree at 8 am or she will send out a hit squad on me.” Darcy’s words tumbled out, her bright, blue eyes large and exaggerated in faux terror behind her dark-framed glasses.

Coulson snorted loudly at Darcy’s response.

Foster stared at her intern briefly before moving on. “I am going to be spending time with my mother as well for the holidays...London, as a matter of fact, out of JFK. I was lucky, actually, I only had to cancel the flight from Albuquerque to New York, so this actually worked out!”

The mention of London caused a reaction Peggy hadn’t felt in a long time to rise within her...longing. Perhaps it was the idea that Jane Foster was going there, perhaps it was the fact that Christmas was literally around the corner, much to Peggy’s surprise, perhaps it was the fact that she hadn’t been there since 1946, but the acute ache of homesickness and loss struck her in that moment. She rather missed home.

“Of course,” she found herself stuttering, slapping on a smile as she waved a hand. “We’ll make accommodations for you both till you have to leave and I’ll see if we can have you connect with SWORD after the holidays. In the meantime, Dr. Foster, if you could begin work with what you have, I’ll have space set up for you here to do it.”

“I’m happy to,” Foster exclaimed, glancing at Darcy. “Think you can help me set up equipment here?”

“If that hot agent who helped us unload is involved, yes.”

“I’ll see if Agent Kam can help you set up.” Peggy rose to see them both out of the door. “In the meantime, I need to speak with Agent Coulson briefly on another situation.”

“Of course,” Foster assured her as Peggy allowed them both out, following only to pull Cassandra from her office to hand off the pair. Peggy watched the three of them briefly, feeling confident in leaving Foster and her intern in Cassandra’s hands for the time being, before returning to Coulson in her office, engrossed in checking his phone.

“The world hasn’t exploded yet,” she teased, earning a dry smile from him.

“Some days I kind of wish that it would, depending on the situation.” He slid his phone into his pocket. “I sent a message to Maria Rambeau over at SWORD. She will get back to me. How did you miss SWORD as an option anyway?”

“All the acronyms and new things being thrown at me the last two years and you are surprised I forgot that?” Peggy threw herself in her chair, finding it a bit rich he would be shocked by that. “Honestly, I’m still wrapping my head around the idea that the exploration of space is even a thing that people do now. I mean, perhaps I shouldn’t, Howard was obsessed enough with it, but in my defense I had no idea there was such a thing as alien life until Thor announced himself as one, and even then I wasn’t sure I believed him until I saw it with my own eyes.”

“Still, you got to admit the ‘sword’ should have stuck out a bit.”

Perhaps it should have, but it hadn’t. “Darcy is right, having a SWORD and a SHIELD is funny to the point of obvious, showing someone was trying too hard.”

“Who came up with the name of SHIELD again?”

Peggy took his point, but wasn’t sorry for it. “Yes, well, I thought I was being rather clever in 1948. That said, look who has the connections in this world of interstellar intelligence! You can just message their director personally?”

“I was there when SWORD was first thought out. Fury played a big role in it. That was before he became director of SHIELD.”

Peggy had to admit that Phil Coulson kept surprising her. One of the first agents she truly got to know at SHIELD, she had been aware from the start he had held up herself and Steve with a sense of awe and reverence, something that had bemused and unsettled her. But as she got to know the mild-mannered, driven, and quick-thinking left-hand to Nick Fury, she realized that Coulson was very much the type of man who Peggy would have hired in her days in the SSR and SHIELD. He was determined, good-hearted, dedicated to the work of SHIELD and doing whatever he could to ensure that the world and people were safe. She could honestly say in the two years since she had first met him that Coulson had become a dear friend.

“Cassandra told you why Fury wants you out here, right?”

Coulson’s expression remained neutral but she could see the hint of excitement light up his eyes.

“I don’t know how we will ever even explain how he is back. I mean, when I came back we just...didn’t address it. Then again, no one knew me outside of the intelligence community. I can walk down the street and not be recognized.”

“In fairness, I doubt many people nowadays would look at Steve Rogers and recognize him,” Coulson countered with mild sadness. “It’s a pity, because they should. They should all remember him for what he did.”

“Times change.” In so many ways Peggy was rather grateful that no one remembered Steve’s face. She couldn’t help but think that Steve would rather prefer it that way. “I doubt that anyone has seen one of his movies in decades.”

“There are more people than you would think, judging from the online forums.”

Peggy laughed outright at that. “Of course you would know, I am supposing from checking out those forums for yourself?”

“It’s a great way to find good memorabilia.”

Peggy could only shake her head. “Would you like to see him?”

“I wasn’t going to ask, but…”

Peggy was already leading the way, needing little to no excuse to go downstairs. “Come along!”

Coulson practically leapt up to follow her.

“What is your plan,” she asked, conversationally, as they made their way to the bank of elevators. “For reintroducing the world to him?”

“There are several things - I mean, technically, he is still a commissioned officer in the United States Army. They will want a slice of all this, of course, considering he’s one of the more famous soldiers to come out of World War II.”

“Not to mention pay.”

“I doubt that the Defense Department is going to love hearing that. But then there is the tricky part of who gets to claim Rogers. SHIELD technically would have the right to him and all the research around him according to the charter.”

Peggy frowned as the doors opened. “You make it sound as if he were a prime piece of meet to be fought over.”

“In fairness, the only successful super soldier, living and available, you better believe that people are going to fight over him. But that said, I think it’s best if we leave the choice up to Captain Rogers.”

Till the moment he said it, it hadn’t occurred to Peggy that the element of choice was in this at all. She hadn’t even thought of it. From the moment she had agreed to Scott Lang’s plan, all she knew was that there was a future filled with peril, that the Avengers were the only way to stop it, and Steve was part of the key to doing that. She had operated on all of this information ever since, making decisions, moving pieces, waiting for the day he would wake up. It hadn’t occurred to her that it may not be what he wanted to do once he did.

“Carter,” Coulson called her name, softly. “What floor are we on?”

Peggy blinked realizing he had already asked her that question once. “Oh, uh...we are going to G3.”

As usual, the AI spoke up in her bland voice. “G3: Clearance: Welcome Director Carter, Agent Coulson.”

“Thank you,” Coulson replied to the AI, absently, glancing at Peggy. “Everything all right?”

“Yes,” she assured him, even if she didn’t feel it. “I mean...of course. It’s just a lot of details to think of.”

“I will work with Kam and Maria Hill on the paperwork to get him declared legally alive, get him all of his credentials. He will need to get set up with the basics, of course - official documents, a place of residence.”

“We can worry about things like his residence once he’s here.” Peggy didn’t even want to think about that just yet. Honestly, she wasn’t sure that once he was awake she would want him to live anywhere that she couldn’t see him, just to reassure herself that he was alive. “Besides, knowing him, he’ll want to find a place in Brooklyn or something.”

“Maybe, though with the price of Brooklyn anymore…”

The doors opened and Peggy led them both out, very much not wanting to discuss Brooklyn or where Steve would be laying his head. “Like you said, when he is awake, he can choose, correct?”

“Sure! I suppose he will want to have the choice. After all, I can’t imagine he’s had too many of those since the day he took that serum.”

“No,” Peggy breathed, grimly, pressing her hand to the security pad by the locked lab doors. “He hasn’t exactly had that.”

They stepped inside. As usual, the team overseeing his care were there, the day shift as she had learned. Several of them were reviewing data, but others smiled at her as she wandered over to the pod where Steve continued to rest - like a fairy tale prince, except in reverse. The knight was the one caught in the curse, she supposed. She resisted the urge to whisper a hello to him, knowing Coulson was standing right there.

Coulson, for his part, stood there in rapt, awed silence.

“I wish he were awake to meet you.” Peggy couldn’t help the wistful note in her voice. “I think you two would get on.”

“Would we?” Coulson stared at her in delighted wonder. What must this be like for him, she wondered? Like meeting DiMaggio or some other famous sports star would have been for the boys in the SSR? She imagined the analogy still fit for modern sports heroes.

“You know,” Coulson chuffed, his usual equanimity softening somewhat around the edges. “My dad would be floored, if he were here.”

He had mentioned his late father before, of the time spent with him watching old Captain America movies. “You must miss him.”

“Everyday,” he admitted, readily. “Him and mom both, especially this time of year, I suppose.”

Peggy thought of her visceral reaction to Jane Foster’s trip to London to see her mother. “I think I know what you mean.”

“It’s tough being by yourself, but...you’ll have him back soon.”

Not soon enough, as far as Peggy was concerned. 

“You know, it didn’t occur to me that the holidays were coming.” She paused, frowning at that admission, before continuing. “I mean, I vaguely knew, but I hadn’t paid any attention. The moment that Hill called me to tell me they had found him, nothing else...no one else has mattered. I hadn’t remembered Christmas till Foster said something.”

“I don’t think anyone would fault you for that. It’s a lot to be preoccupied with.”

“You would think I would be better at this, holding all these scattered, disparate pieces together.”

“Everyone has their limits,” Coulson observed, with his usual, dry smile. "Even legendary founders of SHIELD. He’ll wake up. You’ll figure this out. You’ll move ahead. You’re Peggy Carter, I don’t think you know how to do anything else.”

Peggy wished in the moment she had that much faith in herself as Coulson seemed to have in her.

“What are your plans for Christmas,” she found herself asking him, more on a whim than anything.

“Portland,” he replied, the word fairly bursting from him, his ears turning a hue of pink that Peggy didn’t think she had ever seen on the normally unflappable Coulson. His smile, spreading in the soft, vaguely soppy sort of way. “Oregon, that is, not Maine...the Pacific Northwest.”

“Should be nice this time of year there. I’ve never been.”

“I’ve been many times. Lots of trees and fog, but snow too, if you are up for the skiing.”

Peggy let her glance slide towards Steve’s still form. She thought she had seen enough snow to last a lifetime. “Do you...enjoy it?”

Lost in a moment, Coulson blinked in vague confusion. “Enjoy what?”

“Skiing?”

“Me? No, I mean, I grew up in Wisconsin, I barely blink at snow, but...no, throwing myself down the side of the mountain on a pair of waxed pieces of fiberglass isn’t precisely my idea of a good time.”

“What is your idea of a good time in Portland, Oregon,” Peggy pressed, more because she was fascinated and amused by this new, random side of Coulson than anything.

“Oh, well... the symphony is lovely.”

“Ahh,” Peggy now was getting somewhere. “I didn’t know you appreciated classical music.”

“I didn’t either,” he shrugged, moony-eyed and clearly enthralled.”

“So, what’s her name and what is her instrument?”

At least he had the grace not to deny it. “That obvious?”

“Any more and you would little animated cupids floating around your head.”

She didn’t know Coulson was capable of blushing. “Audrey...her name is Audrey. She plays the cello. She’s been touring of late, as a matter of fact, with an orchestra, you know, doing a lot of the Christmas music sort of thing, but she’s heading back home and I’ll spend the holiday with her.”

It sounded so sweet and earnest and...well, rather like Coulson, actually. It was a glimpse of the man beyond the suit that Peggy so rarely got to see and she found it delighted her. “It sounds lovely! I am sure she’s lovely as well if you are flying to Portland to spend the holidays with her.”

“She is. Perhaps, when things settle down, you can get out there, meet her. You’d like her.”

The fact he felt open enough with Peggy to even offer left her nearly speechless. She did find words, though, and a smile with them. “Of course! I’d love to.”

“I know Pepper Potts is interested in meeting her as well,” he chuckled, shrugging. “It's nice not to have just work being the only thing I talk about with people.”

Somehow, the idea of Pepper Potts having enough of a connection with Coulson to build up a friendship with him didn’t surprise Peggy. “Well, I hope you enjoy your day.”

“You too! What will you be doing?”

Peggy shrugged, waving her hands expansively. “Here I suppose.” Frankly, she couldn’t imagine not. She was sure that Sharon would want her to come down to be with the family, the large Carter brood that gathered in Northern Virginia. Certainly she had the year before, but with Steve now there, still in a frozen limbo, the idea of Virginia felt too far away and uncertain.

Coulson didn’t judge her, though. He seemed to at least understand. “He’ll be awake soon. Don’t worry.”

He was right...but waiting for that moment…

“The first conversation I ever recall with him, he accused me of doubting him.” Peggy laughed, even thinking of the memory. “I’ve since learned my lesson and try never to make that mistake again.”

“Still, it’s hard not to worry. I get it. Love isn’t a rational thing.”

“Clearly not when it makes you jet off to Portland to listen to classical music for hours.”

“This coming from a woman who traveled through time to find her true love in a glacier.”

“Well, I do suppose you have a point,” Peggy conceded, chuckling. “The things we do for love, hmmm?”

“The things we do,” Coulson agreed. “Though, frankly, I would do a few things to get a cup of coffee at the moment.”

“That I think we can arrange,” Peggy agreed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, hey there, SWORD! I am sure most of you realize SWORD just got introduced in WandaVision. I have shifted the meaning of the acronym to the original comic book one on purpose - I have a whole running theory about Hayward and even if the MCU doesn't go that way, I'm using my story as an excuse to have SWORD's focus be very different in 2011 than it is in 2023. Twelve years changes a lot! So...anyway, super excited to work a bit of a WandaVision Easter Egg in here.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peggy meets with a contemporary.

Terminals were not a new concept to Peggy - certainly, she had been to many large and palatial train stations and shipping ports - the expansiveness of the modern airport terminal left her highly overwhelmed. She would be the first to admit that her propensity for taking the train between New York and Washington and her fondness for requisitioning quinjets through SHIELD at the drop of a hat came from her dislike of the bustle, the noise and the inconvenience of the airport terminal. Blessedly, her status with SHIELD afforded her the ability to walk through the security protocols at John F. Kennedy Airport without a ticket and with barely more than a curious flicker of a glance from the TSA agents reviewing her credentials, before asking her business and calling it in to their supervisor. With barely more than that, Peggy had made it through to the gated areas, filled with sleepy travelers, a dizzying array of shopping choices, and a plethora convenience food that hardly sounded appetizing.

She was headed to a restaurant, however, one that served Mexican inspired fare. Given the large crowds of holiday travelers, she had expected to wander, but it wasn't hard to pick out among the coffee shops and sports bars. Surprisingly, neither was her target. She had sequestered herself in one of the few booths in the themed space, designed to look like someone had placed a plastic adobe cantina in the middle of Queens, Peggy guessed. She briefly waved off the hostess as she nodded to the booth, wending around a chili-ornament themed Christmas tree and a server carrying a tray of hot food, handling both with agility as she came to the woman, her eyes glued to her phone as she sipped from a rather large and icy mixed drink.

“Maria Rambeau?”

The woman’s dark eyes flickered upwards, curious, then shocked, then wondering as she straightened in her seat to look Peggy up and down. “Wow...you really are her, aren’t you?”

It hadn’t occurred to Peggy that this woman might know who she was, precious few outside of SHIELD did. Perhaps it should have, considering that she was the director of a somewhat sister organization. “When last I checked, yes, but some days I do have to question it. Might I sit?”

“Oh, yeah,” the woman waved a hand across the booth to the empty space. Peggy slid in, the vinyl creaking as she tried to manage it as gracefully as one could.

Rambeau still continued to stare at her, clearly still shocked that Peggy was even there. “When Fury and Coulson said they were sending over Peggy Carter to meet with me, I laughed right in Fury’s face. Peggy Carter’s been dead sixty years! Guess who looks stupid now.”

Peggy could only smile somewhat uncomfortably at that. “Considering how long I was missing, I’m shocked you even know who I am.”

“How could I not? Not many other examples in this business to look up to in terms of starting an intelligence organization from the ground up, and certainly no one else who is a woman. I had Fury give me everything he could on the founding of SHIELD, and I have to say, for all the bullshit you put up with, I admire you.”

Peggy wasn’t sure she could turn any more red than what she was at the moment, and she wasn’t a woman to blush easily. “I was just...doing a job, that’s all, same as everyone else.”

“Mmmm,” Rambeau shook her head vigorously, not even moving one of her neat, precisely-cut black hairs. “See, that’s why I admire you. That’s the attitude you had, you were working to do good, like everyone else. It’s an attitude more leaders should have, but few don’t.”

Peggy found herself warming to this woman already. “I’m glad to see that you respect that.”

“I’ve seen it when leaders aren’t that way, so, I try to learn from good examples, not bad ones.” Her smile was wide and bright and Peggy found herself grinning back. “Anyway, I can sit here and gawk at you all day, but my flight boards in an hour-an-a-half. Coulson said you need to get one of your scientists in at SWORD.”

“Yes, Dr. Jane Foster, she’s an astrophysicist.”

“Works on Einstein-Rosen Bridges,” Rambeau nodded, all business suddenly as she reached for a basket of chips that sat on the table, dipping it in fresh salsa. “I know of her, know her work.”

“Foster would be pleased to hear that. She said she applied but SWORD wouldn’t hire her.”

“Nope,” Rambeau shrugged, unapologetically, crunching on her chip thoughtfully, before sipping her margarita and continuing. “Foster’s got a lot of potential, but we have people doing cutting edge work at SWORD, grads from CalTech, MIT, Oxford, Cambridge, the Sarbonne, you name it, all the major programs, all fighting to get a foot in the door at SWORD. She was more interested in chasing down her pet theories, and that’s fine, but I didn’t feel that her interests were quite in line with SWORD’s mission.”

Peggy couldn’t help but feel a bit defensive of Jane Foster, knowing the work she did and experiences she had. “You might want to start talking to her, considering her work has also connected her with Thor of Asgard.”

“I heard about that,” Rambeau didn’t miss a beat. “Heard his brother nearly destroyed a New Mexico town. Heard he went back home and hasn’t been seen since.”

“No, he hasn’t,” Peggy admitted calmly.

“Heard he was also ridiculously attractive, too, which you know shouldn’t be fair considering he’s a god.”

Peggy couldn’t help but snort with laughter at her comment. “He is very impressive, I will admit. But all that aside, you may not want Jane Foster, but I do. She’s the one link we have to the Asgardians, but more than that, she’s the one person I have on my team who knows what to look for.”

And now they were getting to the heart of the matter.

“What are you looking for, by chance?” Rambeau clearly knew something of it. Her expression was too carefully neutral, but she was curious. She wasn’t SHIELD, she hadn’t been there when Peggy mysteriously appeared out of nowhere and hadn’t heard all the stories of her miraculous return, not unless Fury told her, which Peggy doubted he did. Fury liked to only dole out information to certain people, and only in forms he wanted them to know. Peggy guessed that he told Rambeau that she was there out of some strange circumstance of time and space and left it at that, saying it was classified. That said, she was an associate of Fury’s, chances were high that if he had seen more insane things in this universe than Peggy reappearing after sixty years, perhaps so had this woman.

“I feel perhaps I should start a bit at the beginning,” Peggy opened, carefully. “Or at least at the beginning of this insane story for me.”

That absolutely piqued her interest. “Okay, shoot.”

Peggy took a deep breath, running one lacquered nail across the table top. “New Years Eve, 1948, I was returning from a party at Howard Stark’s penthouse. Along the way I meet a man who claims he is from the future, that he’s there to find me because I need to come to the future and help save the Avengers.”

“The Avengers?” The name was clearly familiar to her. “Fury’s pet project?”

Apparently he did talk about some things. “That’s the one. I didn’t know what it was, but the man, Scott Lang, begs me to come.”

“And you just...did it?” Her voice, slow and smooth, drawled in patent disbelief. Peggy couldn’t exactly blame her, frankly her reaction would likely be the same if she were in Rambeau’s shoes.

“In my defense, I’ve done much more foolish things in my life. I was, after all, friends with Howard Stark.”

“Point taken,” she granted with a sort of knowing chuckle. “So...how did this all happen?”

Here, Peggy was less sure in her footing. She knew something of Lang’s explanation of how time travel worked, but not the particulars of the science at all. “Apparently, at some point in the future from here Tony Stark invents time travel using technology invented by a man named Hank Pym involving...quantum physics?”

It was a horrible explanation, Peggy knew it, but it was all she really understood about it. Rambeau’s already stunned expression turned positively stoic at this point. She silently waved her hand in a gesture to continue.

“Lang’s original plan had been to bring me forward in time. He said he was setting it to January 2012, which as we both know looking at a calendar isn’t for another two weeks. His reasoning for this was because it was before a battle that will take place, here in New York, at some point during this year. The only details I know about said battle are that it is an alien invasion and that they stop it. Who and what they are, the date it happens, why it even happens, I don’t know. And the thing is, I need to know, because there are powers that be in SHIELD who believe that the Avengers are a categorically foolish idea and want to stop it at any cost. Unless I can prove that they are needed, desperately, to stop what may be coming, the Avengers might be scrapped before they even get off the ground and we will be left flatfooted and unprepared. So, I need Jane Foster to see what she can do to reach out and find what threat might be coming at us so I can then present this to the World Security Council and tell them all to quit collectively acting like gits about this.”

Her torrent of words finally stopped, cascading over Rambeau as the other woman simply watched her, unblinking, for long moments after Peggy stopped speaking. She then took a deep breath and let it out, her laughter dry and lingering.

“I wish I could tell you that was the craziest thing I ever heard, but you have to see some of the crap I deal with all day to really appreciate the insanity of this universe.” She reached up to massage the bridge of her nose briefly before continuing. “So, aliens are invading New York sometime this year, but you don’t know who or why?”

It wasn’t till she repeated it back to Peggy that she realized just how foolish it did sound. “That’s it. I was still grappling with the idea of going to the future, the Avengers, and insane dangers to catch that Lang hadn’t given me the details. I believe he intended to, but in the jump we got separated and I have no idea where he ended up.”

“Jumping with a Stark made time machine?” Something about that apparently impressed, awed and amused her. “I told Hayward we should have brought him on as a consultant somehow.”

“He wouldn’t have done it,” Peggy replied nearly instantly. “Or he would have made you pay out the nose for it. Honestly, I had to work to get his trust.”

“I’ve heard the stories,” Rambeau assured her with something of a weary air. “Well, at least I know the answer to the mystery of what happened to you. Why you, though?”

“Why me what?”

“Why you for the Avengers?” The question sounded obvious coming from her. “I mean, no offense, but Fury’s been kicking that around for about as long as I’ve known him, and despite the politics of SHIELD he’s more than capable of handling it. Why did you need to be the one to tackle it and make this work? Of all the people in the universe, why you?”

If her early admiration had inflated Peggy’s ego somewhat, this question deflated it. She certainly wasn’t being mean, she had a point. Lang had come back in time to find her specifically. To an outsider, it shouldn’t make sense.

“Lang said that in the future, in 2018, there is someone who will come who will threaten the entire universe. He said his name is Thanos. Does the name sound familiar?”

Rambeau frowned in thought, stirring her slushy drink idly with a straw. “No, not off the top of my head. You got any more information on him?”

“No,” Peggy sighed, sadly, not for the first time cursing the fact she and Lang had separated and she could get no more answers. “Only that when he does arrive he manages to kill half the universe.”

Peggy should be glad the woman didn’t laugh in her face. Instead, Maria Rambeau became very serious, even her fingers twirling her straw stilling. “Half the universe?”

“That is what Lang told me.”

“With what?”

Frustration rose to the fore. “I don’t…”

“Know, yeah, I’m getting that idea.” The other woman’s brusk cut off underscored that she too felt Peggy’s sense of frustration at the lack of what information they had. “And Lang didn’t bother to explain any of this?”

“No, like I said, he planned to deposit me in January 2012. I ended up in January 2010. Where he was, I don’t know, but not with me, and the Scott Lang who exists in this time wouldn’t know what was going on. He was adamant, however, that this Thanos was dangerous, he was deadly, and the Avengers were the only way to stop him, but in his time the Avengers split up over differences. They weren’t even working together when Thanos arrived and consequently, they couldn’t stop him. So, he succeeded and half of the universe died in an instant.”

When she laid it out on the table there between them, Peggy realized just how insane this all sounded, how absolutely barking mad. But to her surprise, Rambeau wasn’t dismissing her, nor was she denying it. If anything, she was mulling it over, thinking. Peggy couldn’t imagine what had to be running through her head.

“So you are here to keep these Avengers from going off the rails in order to stop someone named Thanos. That isn’t related to this other alien invasion you want Jane Foster looking into?”

“Two separate situations,” Peggy confirmed for clarity.

“Got it,” she nodded, slowly, still mulling this over. “And you are here to keep these Avengers from splitting. Why you of all the people in all of space and time?”

That was blessedly simple, thankfully, so much so Peggy could have laughed. “Because I am about the only person in the universe who could wrangle both Tony Stark and Steve Rogers on a team together and still keep her sanity.”

Peggy didn’t think the poor woman could be any more surprised that day. “Steve Rogers? As in Captain America Steve Rogers?”

“Yes,” Peggy responded, simply.

“The one who died in 1945?”

“Not died, just...crashed into a glacier and was covered in ice.”

Rambeau only shook her head, clearly overwhelmed at the sheer amount of strange and weird information that had just been dumped on her lap. “Here I thought this was just a simple request to let Jane Foster come look at our stuff!”

“You did ask for details.”

“That I did.” She sighed, pushing aside her beverage. “All right, so you’ve found Steve Rogers, who is alive but is in ice I am assuming.”

“Correct.”

“And he will be on this Avengers team with Tony Stark, who you have somehow managed to corral into this?”

“Yes.”

“Anyone else?

Peggy figured if this woman already knew about the Avengers she may as well go for broke. “One of SHIELD’s main operatives, Natasha Romanoff.”

“I know her. She’s good. Anyone else?”

“Bruce Banner, a scientist who was caught up in an accident involving Abraham Erskine’s formula.”

“Him I don’t know about.”

“You might know some,” Peggy explained with an arched expression. “He was one of the ones responsible for the incident in Harlem last spring. The green one.”

The poor woman would be catatonic by the time she got on her plane. “You really did put together the most motley crew ever for this project.”

Peggy could only shrug helplessly. “In my defense Fury simply handed the entire project over to me and told me to make it happen, so I did.”

“Yeah, not shocked by that.” For the first time since Peggy started speaking Rambeau smiled. “I told him years ago the idea was crazy, but he wouldn’t let it go.”

“So you knew about these Avengers already, the idea of them?”

“Well, yeah, he cooked up this crazy-ass scheme in my dining room.” Rambeau chuckled fondly. “He got the name off my best friend, Carol, actually. She and I came up through the ranks in the Air Force. Her call sign was Avenger. I guess he liked the name.”

It was certainly a striking title for the group. “What was his purpose behind this group in the first place? I got thrown into the middle of this by happenstance, not by design. Why was it he even thought of it?”

Rambeau paused, clearly thinking through her words carefully. “Because there was an incident fifteen years ago that opened our eyes a bit as to how big this universe is and what sort of threats are out there. He isn’t wrong, Director Carter. The universe is huge out there, with all manner of threats, and the Earth is very small and very vulnerable indeed. SWORD is just now getting to a place where we can start to understand the universe and all the things in it. Earth needs something here to ensure that it’s safe. And I know the World Security Council, and I know the people who play around on it and they think they can stop anything and everything if they have a bigger gun, but sometimes it’s not weapons that win a war, it’s people just doing the right thing.”

Peggy couldn’t help but think of Steve as she said that. “I couldn’t agree with you more.”

“Yeah, well bureaucrats are cynical like that, I guess. They hear ‘heroes’ and they think of people in capes and out of comic books. My dad always used to say that a hero isn’t anything more than a person who stands up for what is right and refuses to move. It takes a lot of courage to do that when you got everyone coming at you, telling you to shut the hell up, sit down, and know your place. I suppose in his time and in his place he knew a thing or two about that.”

Knowing what she did, Peggy could well imagine Rambeau's father probably did. “Your father is right, you know. Sadly, I wish he was the one I had to convince about the upcoming situation. Fury knows the truth, I know it, but they don’t understand it. I know a threat of some sort is coming in the next few months, and I need to have more information. If I send Foster to work with your teams, will you allow it?”

Reambeau tapped a lacquered nail against the thick stem of her margarita glass. “I will, in exchange you not only give us a heads up but allow Foster to work with us in future on any information from this attack. I would much rather work with SHIELD on this than against them.”

Considering her relationship with Fury, Peggy couldn’t imagine he would say no to that request. “I think that can be arranged. And I believe it goes without saying that the information I shared with you is…”

“For my ears only, I know.” She pointedly glanced around the airport. “Not precisely the most secret place in the world, but JFK on the week before Christmas, ain’t no one who is going to hear over this sort of loud hustle in here.”

Considering the sheer amount of people, Peggy highly doubted it. “Foster is out of the country for the holidays. Can I send her and her intern to you after she gets back?”

“I will get clearance for both of them if you can send me their information.” She glanced at her watch, a practical timepiece of leather with a gold face. “And with that, I need to catch a flight soon. Have my own family to head to for Christmas.”

Peggy smiled, despite the slight pang of sadness that thought caused. “Where are they?”

“Parents and the extended family are in Louisiana, my daughter is with SWORD, so she’s in Florida. She’s flying to New Orleans tomorrow, then driving in.” She reached for a bag, pulling out her wallet and some cash to cover her drink and snack. “Christmas and Thanksgiving are mandatory unless we are under orders or are facing a crisis. Only excuses we got.”

“Seems to be a running theme,” Peggy considered Darcy Lewis’ comments the week before.

Something compassionate and sad flickered across Rambeau’s face. “How about you? A woman out of time, stuck here in the future, lost decades of your life, you got people to be with for Christmas?”

“Oh, yes, technically.” Peggy brushed off the other woman’s well-meaning concern. “My older brother’s family live in northern Virginia, just outside of Washington DC. And I have a dear friend from my early days in New York right after the war, she’s still alive, living in Los Angeles. I have options.”

“Good! Worst thing is being in a new world by yourself, not knowing anyone or anything.” There was a wealth of feeling in those words, a subtext Peggy picked up on but couldn’t understand. “It’s good you got family and aren’t alone.”

Despite the fact she very much planned on spending this holiday in New York, close to Steve, Rambeau’s words warmed Peggy. “I’m glad that despite it all I’m not alone either.”

Rambeau tossed some bills on the table, tucking away her wallet and things and gathering herself up. “Not going to lie, Director Carter, you got a crazy story. Still not the craziest I’ve heard, but pretty crazy.”

She almost was afraid to ask.

“It’s Peggy, you know,” she offered instead. “I mean, yes, they call me director, I think the title is honorary at this point, but I tend to prefer either Peggy or Carter.”

“Peggy, then.” She graced Peggy with one of her infectious grins. “Maria, that way you don’t mix me up with Monica, my daughter.”

“Maria, it’s a pleasure.”

She was clearly pleased by that. “I still can’t believe I’m meeting you. That’s insane.”

“I suppose I can make a similar argument. I can’t believe I’m in this world some days.”

“I bet. I’m still not certain Fury’s idea for this scheme isn’t doomed to fail, but I don’t know. Your story might be crazy, but clearly you are the type of insane, stubborn, resourceful woman to make this all work somehow, and if there is anyone who understands that it’s me.

Peggy had a feeling she had just made friends with a kindred spirit. “Then I will make sure to call you when it all goes to hell in a hand basket on me.”

“I hear you, but I have a feeling it won’t.” Having just met Peggy, and having just heard her insane story, Maria Rambeau clearly had a lot of confidence in her that Peggy wasn’t so sure she deserved. “But call me all the same if it does go to hell in a hand basket.”

“I will,” Peggy rose with her, offering her hand to the other woman. “I won’t keep you from your flight then. Have a safe trip back to Louisiana.”

“Thank you,” she replied, shaking Peggy’s hand firmly. “And you have a Merry Christmas. Always did like New York at the holidays.”

“Thank you,” Peggy accepted, walking with her out of the small little restaurant.

“You know,” Rambeau drawled as they stood outside, just on the edge of the hustle of the airport, sleepy-eyed travelers with rolling suitcases rushing past them. “I knew Howard Stark back in the day.”

That brought Peggy up short, her brain doing mental gymnastics as she tried to piece together how long ago that would have been. “Really?”

“Yeah, ages ago, back before Monica was even born. When I got out of the academy, it was me and Carol, my friend, two of the first women to graduate as fighter pilots. It was the 80s, though, they weren’t letting women fly combat missions, so rather than be grounded we signed up for Project: Pegasus.”

The name put Peggy's senses on high alert. It had come up several times in connection to Howard, but to Coulson too. It was tied to the project in New Mexico that Coulson never spoke about, the one that Gideon Malick clearly was holding over her head. “Were you really?:

“Yeah!” There was a wealth of fond remembrance in that one syllable. “Anyway, Wendy Lawson was the project head, but she and Howard Stark were thick as thieves working on it. He’s how I first heard about you, you know. He would always remind me and Danvers that being test pilots for a new sort of technology wasn’t being relegated to the minor leagues. The SSR had you doing filing, and you were the toughest, bravest, strongest person that he knew and you founded SHIELD. He said our time would come too. He talked a lot about you. Thought a lot of you too. I don’t know if I’d believe a tenth of your story if he didn’t talk you up so much.”

Her words made Peggy’s eyes burn, but her smile was real enough. “Howard had a tendency to put people up on pedestals, I’m afraid. I fear I am one of them.”

“I don’t know, you did go through time to take over the Avengers to stop an alien invasion, so I think Howard was probably spot on.”

“You haven’t seen me of late. I can be a mess.”

“Aren’t we all, though? Honestly, you wouldn’t be human otherwise.”

“Thank you,” Peggy murmured, realizing that it was the sort of message and the sort of words she needed to hear after the last few weeks.

“You’re welcome. Send me Foster’s information and I will get things set up for her. Maybe she or these Asgardians can give us a lead.” She began to turn and step away to her gate before pausing, eyeing Peggy thoughtful. “And this Thanos...the one you said the Avengers will need to stop. I’ll have my people keep an ear to the ground. I can’t promise we turn up anything, but I’ll see what I can find out.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Merry Christmas, Peggy.”

“The same to you, Maria.”

Peggy watched as the other woman turned, wending her way through the streams of travelers to her own gate. After a long moment, she turned, moving to leave the airport, dodging a young, college age woman moving what looked to be a mountain of luggage on a cart and a professional looking man in a great coat and a Santa hat on his head, rushing towards the exit. Would there ever be a time that this brave new world she stepped into would cease to keep surprising and made of wonder, even in something as simple as a friendly connection to a new person.

Somehow, Peggy doubted it.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peggy gets some unexpected bad news.

“Merry Christmas, Director.”

“Happy Christmas,” she responded back, mostly on automatically, to the security on duty at the moment. On Christmas Day even SHIELD was lightly staffed, but the agents who roamed the lobby and major traffic areas all recognized her in her large, warm wool overcoat and her bright red fedora. She didn’t know the name of this security guard, however, a tall, broad man who looked as if he might play American football, or might have done, once upon a time.

“You came up short of guard duty then,” she teased, waving her badge through the security protocol.

“Yeah, one of the newer guys, you know how it is.” His badge had his smiling picture and the name of Jamal Anderson. “Doing dinner tonight with my family, though.”

“Good man,” she smiled, tucking her own badge safely away, imaging the young agent getting to go home to a boisterous family, all eager and happy to see him home to spend part of the holiday with them. “Enjoy your Christmas turkey later, then.”

“Thanks!” He waved farewell as she turned brisk steps across the lobby to the elevators. The space was mostly dark, save for the security lights which were always on and the strings of elegant, while fairy lights strung up to glitter against marble and chrome. Compared to many of the gaudy displays she had seen over the last week or so, the SHIELD lobby was understated and tasteful, appropriate considering they were at their heart an organization centered on espionage. Blend in, but don’t stand out.

In truth, she had more or less forgotten about the holiday nearly all together this year. Since the fateful phone call from Maria Hill on the day after Thanksgiving, Peggy had given no thought to anything beyond the Avengers and Steve. The idea of Christmas was rather an afterthought, given all that. She had assumed she would use the day to rest, finally, to sleep and re-energize, but had found herself instead wandering to the SHIELD headquarters instead, unable to keep away.

The lab itself was quiet, for the most part. The staff that bustled around the machines on a normal day were home, a skeleton crew being left to monitor the situation. Peggy highly doubted there would be much change in the twenty-four hours of the holiday, especially given that Steve was still in stasis. Still the few who remained all greeted her with well wishes on the day, which she returned in kind, unbuttoning her coat to slip it off and fling it over her arm. On the far end, as always, lay Steve, just as unmoving, just as quiet, still just as battered and bruised.

“Hello, darling,” she sighed, pulling up the cushioned, rolling desk chair the staff kept there. It rumbled across the tile as she settled, setting her coat on top of her bag on a table. The glare of the white lights in the clean, clinical space glittered off the glass of his tube. He lay inside, quiescent, like a figure from a fairy tale, awaiting something to awake him - a spell, a deed, a kiss. Alas, she was so certain that any of those would work this time around. Perhaps the magic of modern medicine? She hoped, at the very least.

“Not the sort of Christmas I would have imagined for the two of us,” she teased, as if he could hear her. “Not that we’ve ever spent a normal Christmas holiday together, mind you.”

In truth, Peggy hadn’t really had a true, proper Christmas in so long, she had to think about the last one her family even shared together. Perhaps 1938, right before the war started. She had still been in the school room, Michael had been finishing at university, and the war that would change all of their lives was months away, nothing but a distant threat that was easily ignored on such a day. They’d gone to some party that evening, friends of her parents who Michael and Peggy had known forever. She’s been allowed to wear her first grown-up dress. Michael had teased her about fending off the men who would fall over in her wake. She’d mildly punched him for it.

That all felt like a million years ago.

“My day wasn’t a total waste,” Peggy found herself assuring Steve’s silent figure, as if he could hear her. “Cynthia, my nephew’s wife, called so she and Harry could wish me a happy day. So strange to think I have family living here in the United States, but there they are. I would be there as well, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave you up here by yourself in a lab for the day.”

As silly as it might seem, Peggy knew she couldn’t. It was bad enough that she had difficulty leaving him there of a night, and only did so knowing that the JARVIS would notice and likely either notify Sharon or, worse, Tony Stark, neither of whom she felt like explaining herself to at the moment. She contented herself with her daily visits, spending a few hours of each day sitting beside his unmoving form, pretending as if he could hear her, as if he were awake to tease her sitting by a soldier’s bedside, his expression carefully stoic save for the world of mischief and...something else, something less defined...burning in his summer blue eyes.

“Angie called me as well.” she continued, shaking herself gently. “My friend from when I first moved to New York. She was checking in. I hadn’t spoken to her in weeks, since Thanksgiving. I hadn’t meant it, of course, not with...everything going on, obviously. I fear I have a horrible habit of keeping poor Angie out of the loop and I had to explain about you to her. Of course, now she’s terribly excited she may get to meet you. She saw you in a USO show once, and I do believe she’s had a crush on you ever since.”

If he’d been awake, he would have blushed as red as the stripes on his uniform. Poor man, Steve had never had women pay overly much attention to him before the serum. Even after, he was shy and bumbling with them at best, at a loss as to what to say, sent to a near panic whenever a beautiful, bottle blonde, batting fake eyelashes, threw herself at him. It was more often than Peggy ever liked, but admittedly it was amusing when one considered how disconcerted he often was afterwards. There was a part of Steve that never forgot being the man overlooked, playing second-fiddle to James Barnes, with his wicked Irish charm and easygoing smile.

_“I never understood how he does that.”_

_Peggy frowned over her pint, caught short by Steve’s observation. His attention was across the smoky and hazy pub, filled with revelers, mostly members of the 107th with leave enough to go out for a bit of holiday cheer during an otherwise grim season. Through the small throng she could spy Bucky Barnes, Steve’s best friend and second-in-command, chatting up a charming redhead, a young woman from the office pool who Peggy had seen about._

_“I’m assuming you mean Barnes?”_

_“Yeah,” Steve grimaced, pulling mildly from his own pint, studying his friend in the far corner as he might study his tactical maps or intelligence briefings. “He seriously was over there, chatting it up with Morita and Jones two minutes ago, then glides right up to the bar beside her and next thing you know she’s eating right out of his hand.”_

_Peggy snorted, trying to remember it wasn’t polite to shame someone else for how they chose to live their life, but unable to stop the petty thought all the same. “That is Molly Fitzpatrick. Frankly all you have to do is walk past her and she will chase after you like you were a walking fiver. I doubt Barnes had to work hard to get her to swoon over him.”_

_“I don’t think he ever has to work hard, women just swoon.” This was a hint of mild disgust under his otherwise wistful tone. She doubted few people would ever notice it, but she did._

_“Barnes does have the way with the ladies, I won’t deny that.” She could tell from the moment she met him. He had eyed her with the look of a man who was well used to beautiful women being sucked into his orbit. Peggy was well versed with that sort of man, after all, she did work with Howard Stark all the time. Still, Barnes hadn’t cried over Peggy's rejection and had been making his way through the young ladies staffing the SSR offices, Molly Fitzpatrick being the latest._

_“He was like that when we were kids.” Steve’s grimace turned to wry nostalgia in an instant. “Every girl had a crush on him, even in grade school. Every little girl wanted to play kissing games with him. I swear, he even charmed the nuns. I don’t know how, but he did.”_

_Peggy couldn’t help but laugh at the idea, the image of a young Bucky Barnes with his winsome smile and sparkling, pale blue eyes, smooth talking himself and Steve out of some sort of childhood scrape, making some severe, matronly sister blush with a wave and a wink. “Did he make a habit out of sweet talking holy virgins?”_

_“Only in junior high, really,” Steve admitted. “Never could pull one over with his mother, though, she always saw right through him. Some woman has to be immune to his charms, I suppose, and given that she raised him, I suspect she is on to his games.”_

_“Most assuredly,” Peggy confirmed, grinning. “Mothers usually always are. Michael could get away with very little with our mother.”_

_She rarely mentioned her brother and thus it piqued Steve’s interest, one eyebrow quirking at her playfully. “Just Michael, then? Never Margaret?”_

_“Oh, well, she always expected trouble out of me, which meant Michael, the cad, could get away with all sorts of things. He always was her favorite.”_

_“I see,” he grinned, suspecting, rightly so, that there was more to it than that. “Didn’t it ever make you crazy?”_

_Peggy shrugged, running a nail over the rim of her pint, considering. She hadn’t thought of Michael, really, in a long time, especially not in a negative way. Perhaps it always felt sacrilegious, like speaking ill of the dead, but she found herself chuckling despite herself. “He was always getting away with it and it always made me horribly jealous, and yes, it drove me crazy.”_

_“Then you get it!” Something about that seemed to relieve Steve as he glared mildly at Barnes at the bar. “You know, he’s my best friend. I love him like my own brother...he is my own brother, practically. But there are times I wish I could just punch him in the face.”_

_“Sounds exactly like what a brother would say,” Peggy teased, nudging him gently, earning a wry smile and shrug for her effort. “It can’t have been easy being known as Bucky Barnes’ best friend.”_

_“Worse, most of them didn’t even notice me enough to know me that well.” Steve put a good face on it, but she could tell the old wounds of his childhood cut deep. They always did, whether people realized it or not. “There was one trip we did as kids out to the beach. It was just me and him, we left his sisters at home. We get out there and we are hanging out, and wouldn’t you know, he comes across a dame - redhead, like that one. And so he spends the entire afternoon flirting with her and uses all our fair money to win her some stupid toy. I had never been so angry with him in my entire life. I don’t even remember what he said, but I do remember jumping on him and punching him in the face.”_

_Despite his words, laughter laced his rueful retelling of youthful indiscretions. Peggy couldn't help but chuckle along with him, the image of small, undersized Steve throwing himself at Barnes' head in a frustrated rage a comical image indeed._

_“So how did you two get home," she finally asked, amused by their antics._

_“Ice truck, happened to catch one on its deliveries and it was going by his pop’s place. We helped the driver load up in exchange for a ride.”_

_“I am sure you were giving Barnes hell the whole time for causing this.”_

_“For years! Truth is, I still haven’t forgotten it. Likely never will.” He didn’t sound as if he minded the story so much now, looking back on it with the fond, golden glow of childhood. “I don’t know, I just remember in that moment something breaking, this sheer, unreasonable anger of how unfair it was. There was this pretty girl, all her pretty friends, and I had to trail around behind them all afternoon and listen to them giggle over him and flirt with him. I might as well be chopped liver at that point. And you know, perhaps it was petty, but I was thirteen and frustrated that he was getting taller, bigger, popular with the girls and somehow, I…”_

_He trailed off, looking sad and sheepish as he stared into the golden brown pint before him._

_“You felt as if you were getting left behind?”_

_His eyes flickered towards hers, bright blue under the fringe of dark eyelashes. “Yeah, exactly like that. I was left behind while everyone else got to grow up, move on, living their lives. When you’re thirteen that is one of the worst feelings in the world...right after being rejected by the girl you like.”_

_“So, Captain America, you are merely a regular mortal man after all! Here I thought you were the paragon of virtue and you confessed to being jealous of your own best friend.”_

_Peggy had been teasing, but he took it seriously enough. “I never said I was a paragon of virtue. I know I am most certainly not.”_

_Peggy sobered, only slightly, realizing she hit a nerve. “No one is, Steve. I was teasing. We all have those moments, those...petty moments when our temper or our insecurities get the better of us and we say the silly, foolish, hurtful thing, I know I’ve done it often enough.”_

_She didn’t want to think of that last, horrid conversation with Michael._

_“The truth is you would have to be inhuman to not feel those sort of feelings every now and again,” she continued, glancing towards Barnes in the corner with Molly Fitzpatrick. “We all try not to feel it, I suppose, but we can’t help ourselves.”_

_“I know,” he acknowledged, with the weary acceptance of someone who understands that logically, even if that wasn’t how he always felt. “I thought about that a lot on that plane flight into Austria, you know, of that day, or that fight. All I could think was I’d do that day over a thousand times over if it meant getting Bucky back alive and whole. Hell, I don’t even mind so much that he’s chatting up some other random redhead at a bar.”_

_“Just that it annoys you he can so easily have a conversation with a woman?”_

_“Well, yeah.” He tried to shrug it off as if this was a matter of fact, but Peggy could see the smile pulling up at the corners of his full mouth. Clearly, they had come full circle and he found the irony and humor in the situation. “Because some things never change.”_

_“Do you want them to?”_

_“With Bucky? No,” he admitted, watching his best friend once again. “No, I wouldn’t want him to change. Maybe settle down with one of these girls he’s always chatting up, but not change.”_

_“Well, I hate to point out the obvious to you, captain, but you do realize that you have been bemoaning your best friend’s abilities to chat up a woman for some fifteen minutes now, all the while you have been doing an admirable job on that score yourself.”_

_Perhaps it had just occurred to him, as he blinked in vague surprise at that. “I have, haven’t I?”_

_“I seemed to have noticed you well enough.”_

_For once, Steve Rogers had no witty comeback for her, no playful smile, no arched look. He paused, eyebrows quirking in vague surprise as his mouth worked, then stopped, then fell open all together. Peggy couldn’t help the delighted peel of laughter that bubbled out of her, free and unfettered by the joy of the moment, the warmth of the beer, and the glad tidings of the company._

_“I have to say, Agent Carter, you got me there.” He held up his pint in salute to her. “And I learned long ago never to argue with a woman when she is right.”_

“Director Carter?”

Peggy turned, surprised out of her daydream revelry by the curious voice at her shoulder. She looked up to see Dr. Young, blinking at her owlishly behind her thick glasses.

“Oh...I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were there. Were you trying to get my attention?”

“Just wishing you a Merry Christmas.” The scientist shrugged with good natured well-meaning, her rounded shoulders rising under what had to be the most hideous jumper Peggy had ever seen in her life. “I came to check in on Captain Rogers before I headed out to see my family.”

“Oh!” It occurred to Peggy then that the woman of course would have a family, one she had forgone seeing to be in the city with Steve. “If he was stable, you should have just gone.”

“I actually told my husband to head out to Pennsylvania already. I will be there in a few hours, just in time for dinner.”

Guilt tugged at Peggy as she considered what she was giving up to be there. “Is that where you are from?”

“Lancaster, yeah, certainly not as glamorous as New York, but it’s home...or at least where I grew up.”

It seemed to be the way of this modern world, everyone came from somewhere else. “Is your husband from there, too?”

“No, actually, Oklahoma. We met in grad school in Texas. He works for SHIELD too, out of the Triskelion. He’s an engineer, nothing glamorous, but between the two of us we can afford a house in Maryland, close enough to see my family when we want and far enough away we can avoid them, too.”

“It sounds lovely.” In truth, it did, the idea of having a normal life, with normal concerns and normal family. Peggy wasn’t sure she could even comprehend normal, especially not in the modern world.

“We do alright. This is the first Christmas my family will get to spend with Elliot, our little boy. Last year he was too little to go anywhere with.”

Peggy felt another pang at that thought. “You should really be there with your family then.”

She nodded in that way that people had when they acknowledged that you were right but couldn’t be bothered with accepting it. “I know, I should, and I would have headed out last night, it’s just…”

She trailed off, her gaze turning towards where Steve lay, trouble creasing a line over the bridge of her glasses.

“Dr. Young?” Something icy slid into Peggy’s stomach, her heart skipping at the unasked question.

“I don’t know how this works,” she finally said, frankly, turning a sorrowful gaze to Peggy. “How the serum works. I don’t know how he is doing it or why he isn’t dead. The truth is we’ve run the numbers, I’ve looked at his bloodwork, Dr. Bransteitter and I have poured over every bit of data we could get our hands on, and...I am stuck.”

It wasn’t the response Peggy had hoped for...not at all.

“I came in to see if I could get the labs, maybe take a look...but I don’t know what to do with it. I’ve...I’ve got nothing. I’m sorry, I just...don’t know what to do with it. No one at SHIELD does.”

If she had declared herself Dottie Underwood and punched Peggy in the gut, she didn’t think she could feel more breathless. “What are you saying?”

The other woman looked somewhat defeated as she wrapped her arms around herself, clearly unhappy with sharing that sort of news. “I’m saying that there is a high possibility we can’t figure this out and we can’t revive him.”

That wasn’t what Scott Lang said at all! He said that they Steve had woken up, that they had figured it out. How? When? Once again she tried to sift through the fragments of a conversation held two years ago, trying to remember anything, to piece together what had gone wrong in all of this.

“I...I was led to believe he could be woken up, that SHIELD could do it.”

“Perhaps someone can, I’m just saying with what I have here, I can’t. Abraham Erskine didn’t exactly leave detailed notes, and no one has worked on the serum in decades. I don’t have a wealth of studies or findings to fall back on, and I’m afraid that trial and error would do as much damage as good.”

Peggy felt herself desperately clutching at something, anything to pin hope onto. “SHIELD hasn’t worked on the serum, but others have. The serum, that’s how Bruce Banner had his transformation, that’s how…”

She stopped dead, the pieces falling into place as her jaw dropped, the answer so obvious she felt like an idiot.

Dr. Young frowned, worried. “Director?”

“I know someone who has been working on the serum, and recently.” Hope flickered into a full on inferno within her as she turned, leaping for her bag and the phone inside.

“You do?”

“Yes,” Peggy hissed, snagging the device and straining with a mad grin. “Have you heard of Dr. Elizabeth Ross?”

The scientist’s eyes widened before her own mouth dropped, clearly feeling the same sense of idiocy Peggy just did. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“For what it’s worth, I hadn’t either,” Peggy offered, feeling about as foolish as she was sure Dr. Young did. “And I know where to find her.”

“Will she be willing to come in and help us?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Peggy answered with truthful uncertainty. “But I do have information on someone she wants. Maybe that will be enough.”

Because Peggy was banking on the slim chance that Betty Ross might understand Peggy’s plight better than anyone else in the world.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peggy makes a surprise trip to Virginia after all.

Peggy was not sure she had ever begged for anything in her life. She was far more used to just seizing the opportunities she saw rather than begging for a chance. She wasn’t sure she knew how to. She rather hoped Betty Ross wouldn’t make her have to do it.

Ross lived in a quaint home built of gray river stone, its fenced in yard dusted with a frosting of Christmas snow. Peggy knew that the scientist was home, she could see a car in the driveway and a glittering Christmas tree on a table in the window, but she had yet to go up to the door and knock. Somehow, Peggy hadn’t managed to pluck up that courage yet. While she and Dr. Ross had parted last spring under cordial terms, the truth of her father’s work and the mess it had all made had ramifications and a fall out. Peggy wasn’t sure what the other woman’s reaction would be when Peggy showed up on her doorstep, let alone if it would be welcome or not. Peggy supposed that depended on what her father had told her about it all and if she believed him.

She hadn’t come all this way, all these decades, fought so hard to find Steve, only to be stymied by this.

Resolve in place, she flung open the door of her borrowed vehicle, her booted feet crunching in the snow. The cold air was bracing as she made her way across the yard and up the walk, up to the black door with its cheery wreath of fake fir branches. She rang the doorbell and waited, listening for the telltale sound of pounding feet on the other side of the door. Betty Ross opened the door in what looked like oversized lavender flannel pajamas and a sky-blue fluffy robe, her dark hair pulled up sloppily on top of her head in a saggy bun. Clearly, she hadn’t been expecting to greet any people, and certainly not Peggy Carter. “Uh...Director Carter! Um...hello?”

“Hello,” Peggy offered, overlooking the scientists' disheveled state with as polite of a smile as she could manage. “I am sorry for barging in on you like this, unannounced. I know it’s perhaps not ideal, but...do you mind if I come in?”

The poor woman blinked, clearly till grappling with the idea that Peggy was standing on her doorstep at all. “Uh, yeah, please...by all means!”

She stood aside as Peggy wiped the snow off her boots and entered into the warmth of Dr. Ross’s cozy home. It was rather a darling house, reminding Peggy very much of the quaint flat she’d had before jumping forward into the future. The living area was lovely and tasteful, full of squashy couches, with a television on the far wall playing _It’s a Wonderful Life_ , and a fireplace crackling cheerfully. Judging from the nest of blankets and pillows on the couch and the collection of dishes on the coffee table in front of it, Dr. Ross had camped out happily on the day after Christmas, not expecting visitors.

“I apologize again for interrupting you,” Peggy felt the need to reiterate, giving Dr. Ross a wan smile as the other woman bustled into the room behind Peggy, hastily gathering empty cereal bowls and coffee mugs.

“No, no, it’s fine, just...you know, having Christmas downtime. Watching my favorite old movies.”

Peggy tried not to cringe at the idea of _It’s a Wonderful Life_ being anything close to old. She had gone to see it with Angie when it had been released. Angie had cried through the entire final scene. “No, I understand! I’m sure the semester was busy for you.”

“Right up until the end,” she replied, carrying off her collection of dish ware through a wide open and spacious dining room to a kitchen on the other side, setting things down on the counter. “I had research students this semester, so there were project outcomes to review and then all the finals. It was my rotation with the pre-med and nursing students this semester, and there were so many of them!”

Peggy listened to the scientist's stream of nervous explanation with only half an ear. She wandered the living room, studying the various odds and ends of Betty Ross’ life. The mantle over the fire had Christmas trinkets sprinkled through photographs of Ross and various people in her life. Betty Ross as a small girl, in a pastel pink dress in her father’s arms, the general's uniform indicating he was only a colonel then. There was another with her slightly older standing beside a tall, graceful woman with long, dark hair, so very much her daughter’s, clearly at some school function where the young Betty had won an award. There was a picture of her in soccer kit, another of her and an unknown young man dressed for a formal dance, one of her and a young Bruce Banner huddled up together on a snowy day somewhere, smiling cheerily at the camera. He looked impossible young in those photos compared to the scant few shots Peggy had seen of him of late.

“Can I get you anything to drink? Tea?”

Peggy turned to Ross, shaking her head. “No, I’m fine.”

The woman nodded, catching sight of her robe and pajamas, flushing red to her roots. “Wow, I...was clearly not expecting this.”

“It’s all right, really, I’m the one who showed up so early on the day after Christmas. I should have called, first, but...got impatient, I suppose.” Peggy had paused only long enough to call her nephew and announce she would be coming down after all before boarding the first flight she could get to Washington. While her family had, of course, been thrilled she would be spending at least some of the day with them, her real objective had been to get to Betty Ross as soon as possible. She hadn’t really considered the hour of the morning or if the scientist would even be up and about, especially given that the university itself was closed for the holidays.

“Is there something wrong with Bruce?” Of course, concern for her former fiance would be her first go to. Dr. Ross had limited interaction with SHIELD and there was really no reason for Peggy to even be approaching her for anything else.

Peggy rushed to assure her. “No, he’s fine as far as I know."

She could see the gears spinning in Dr. Ross’ head. “Erik then? He’s doing okay in New Mexico?”

“I just spoke to Agent Coulson and Jane Foster and they didn’t say, but I assume he is well, yes.”

Out of options, she frowned, confused. “If this is about my father…”

“It’s not,” Peggy cut her off with what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “It isn’t, I...may I sit?”

Dr. Ross blinked, eyes flickering to an armchair before nodding, waving towards it. “Oh, yeah, oh my God, please. I’m the world’s worst host.”

“Thank you.” Peggy settled, clasping her still gloved hands in her lap, hoping that her nerves didn’t show. “I’m here because SHIELD needs your help...I need your help.”

Dr. Ross had wrapped her robe around her middle and perched on the edge of the couch cushion. “My help? On what?”

“The super soldier serum.”

Whatever the scientist had expected, it wasn’t that. A myriad of emotions flickered to life on the woman’s face; confusion, surprise, anger, finally landing on cold disappointment. “Why?”

Peggy had feared that would be her response. “I hadn’t hoped we would need to, but…”

“Is that what the whole thing with Bruce was all about? You told me you wanted to help him, that you didn’t want to hurt him or use him.”

“We don’t,” Peggy insisted.

“And yet you want me to come and work on the super soldier serum for you?”

“Not the serum itself, no.”

That hadn’t been the right answer either. “Oh, so you guys do have that other one, what was his name...Blonsky?”

“He is contained, yes, but it isn’t about him either.”

Dr. Ross clearly didn’t believe it, and Peggy could hardly blame her. The poor woman had been used by her own father, lured into his research project only to have him betray that trust once things got out of hand. “I swore to my father I wouldn’t ever recreate that serum, not for him, not for the US Army, not for anyone. I thought SHIELD understood that. I thought _you_ understood that.”

“I do,” Peggy began, her fingers clutching each other so tightly beneath her gloves they hurt.

Dr. Ross was clearly not appeased. “Then why the hell are you here, then? Do you want to use me to get to Bruce, because I won’t do that either. If he wants to spend his life living as some self-flagellating hermit on a mountain shunning the rest of the world, he can, but he made it abundantly clear to me he doesn’t want or need me in his life.”

Peggy somehow doubted that was true, having seen the ferocity with which Banner fought to protect Betty Ross in his monstrous form. “It isn’t for Dr. Banner, either.”

“But you want me to work on the serum?”

“Not to make any more super soldiers, Dr. Ross, I need you to help me with someone who already has it.”

It took her a long moment to really hear what Peggy was saying, her anger shifting to confusion. “Wait, but you said it wasn’t Bruce or Blonsky.”

“They weren’t the only ones who received the serum.”

The other woman paled, visibly, shaken by that pronouncement. “Dad didn’t experiment on anyone else, did he? Don’t tell me that he…”

“No,” Peggy cut her off that line of thinking, deciding it was best not to tell Dr. Ross about the accident with Samuel Stern yet. “No, this isn’t one of your father’s experiments.”

“But then…” She paused, frowning. “I mean, I know of the experiments the Army did after Erskine’s death, all very hush-hush and likely illegal and unethical. I've never gotten my hands on those files because the Army doesn't want to talk about it. Other than those cases the only other known subjects were Johann Schmidt and…”

“Steve Rogers,” Peggy filled in, quietly, meeting Dr. Ross’ unspoken question evenly.

“But he’s dead.” She uttered that as fact.

“No, he’s not.” Peggy replied, softly. “He’s in a coma, frozen at the moment. He was found crashed in a glacier on one of the Canadian Arctic islands. SHIELD recovered him and returned him to New York last week. He is currently being contained in a cryogenic pod there, but our scientists have hit a dead end with him. We are trying to wake him up, but…”

Betty Ross wasn’t a stupid woman. “You want me to come and help you figure out how to do it.”

“Yes,” Peggy said, simply, her fingers aching as they tangled tightly.

For long moments the room was silent, save for the crackle of the fire in the hearth. Peggy held her breath as Ross stared at her, her face unreadable.

When she did speak, it was a singular response. “No.”

Peggy felt her stomach plummet through her. “Why no?”

“I meant what I said, Director. I’ve played with this serum enough. I made something that turned the man I love into a monster all because my father wanted to have the biggest weapons, and I’m not playing that game anymore, not for you, not for SHIELD, not for anyone.”

“It’s not about that,” Peggy began, but was cut off as Dr. Ross threw herself up from the sofa to pace restlessly towards her dining room.

“It’s not? SHIELD wants Bruce. You already have Tony Stark in your pocket. Now you want Captain America to boot? Resurrect him from the dead? Have him be one of your cool new secret weapons you can use it to take out governments you don’t like or whatever it is that you do?”

“It’s not for that,” Peggy bit out, sharply, but was ignored by the other woman in a full tirade.

“What is it going to do to him, waking him up into a new century, a time not his own? Everyone he knows and loves is gone, his entire world turned upside down, and then SHIELD wakes him up to be thrown into this mess? And that’s if he isn’t so horribly injured from his experience that the serum can’t regenerate him. What if his injuries are so serious he won’t heal? What if decades being frozen under less than ideal conditions means he can’t be brought back? What will SHIELD do then, keep his DNA, use it to clone new super soldiers, their own little elite task force that they can have?”

On a rational level, Peggy knew that Betty Ross was speaking out of the hurt, angry and jaded experience she had with her own father, but her every word cut Peggy to the core. “That isn’t what any of this is about,” she whispered.

“Really,” Dr. Ross scoffed, crossing her arms over her robe and pajamas. “You aren’t trying to resurrect America’s greatest soldier to be one of your personal weapons?”

She wasn’t wrong, in the grand scheme of things, SHIELD really was. “It isn’t as simple as that.”

“That’s what my father said, too, when he lied and told me we were working on an anti-terrorism project. What is it this time? A terrorist takeover? The Red Skull emerging from the dead?”

“There are always threats,” Peggy offered, quietly, pointedly meeting Dr. Ross’ irate gaze. “There always are, and Captain Rogers was a patriot who never would have turned his back on any of them.”

Her words only deepened Dr. Ross’s scowl. “He’s a man who gave up his life 70 years ago to save the country he loved. He’s a soldier who earned his rest. His wishes should be respected, his sacrifice honored, not pulled up out of the ice to be resurrected for SHIELD to use as if he’s a weapon.”

“He’s not dead,” Peggy snapped, her voice breaking with it as something fierce, broken and angry rose to the fore. “And those weren’t his final wishes at all.”

_I’m going to have to take a raincheck on that dance…_

“You know, in his last moments before he crashed into the ice, his last thoughts were of dancing. A date...he had wanted to go out after the war and dance. He hadn’t ever been. He didn’t even know how. He wanted to go out, to dance and fall in love and find his perfect partner. Right up until the moment that plane crashed and the radio went to static, that was what he spoke about, what he wanted. He didn’t want to be lost in the ice, to have years taken away from him. He chose to give up his life to protect everyone, but that didn’t mean he didn’t want other things, to live a life, to have a future.”

_I’ll try not to step on your toes…_

“How do you know that?” Dr. Ross’ voice was less hostile, but no less firm. There was doubt there. Peggy could hardly blame her.

“Did you ever notice who signed off on all the reports for Project: Rebirth? All the files, the medical records, the findings? Do you know who it was who freed Abraham Erskine from Johann Schmidt’s lair in Austria? Who trailed after one HYDRA officer after another to see what work they were doing on the the serum, hoping to God they hadn’t gotten as far as Erksine and Stark had?:

As she spoke, she could see Dr. Ross straighten, a mixture of wonder and incredulity forming. “The medical reports were all signed ‘M. Carter’....oh, God!”

Peggy only smiled, sadly.

“Margaret Carter...you can’t be her! She disappeared!”

“In 1949, yes, I know. Sadly, I am her.” Peggy shrugged, so used to the impossibility of her own existence that it always vaguely surprised her when others, like Maria Rambeau, were baffled.

“How?”

“That is a whole other story of which perhaps only Dr. Banner and Tony Stark could explain. Suffice it to say I ended up in this time...well, two years ago at least.” She looked down at her knotted fingers, trying to relax them across her lap. “I have been looking for Captain Rogers ever since. I’ve found him, but no one alive now understands the serum...no one save for you.”

The other woman merely stared, running a hand over her mess of a bun, tugging on it as if hoping that would make something in this entire madness make sense. “You...you found Steve Rogers?”

“Yes,” Peggy murmured, her own frustration starting to ebb. “I won’t sit here and pretend that SHIELD doesn’t want him, they do. The world needs him, very much. But...I need him to wake up. I need him to wake up, to get better, to smile again, to...take me on that dance that he promised me before he crashed that infernal plane. I risked everything for two reasons, Dr. Ross, to save this world for a man’s daughter and to find Steve again, and I have come too far to fail now and you are the solution I have. Please, don’t tell me no.”

The conflict was written all over the woman’s face. She clearly empathized, how could she not, given her own plight, but she feared that serum too. Considering what she had been through, that too was understandable.

“I know where Banner is,” Peggy threw out, half desperately. “There is a way to reach out to him, if you wish.”

A sad half smile crept up Dr. Ross' face. “Are you trying to bribe me, Director?”

“If I have to,” Peggy admitted, unable to smile herself. This was far too serious for that.

Dr. Ross sighed, tugging at her bun again as she turned in place, cursing under her breath. “I swore I wouldn’t get mixed up with it anymore.”

“If it is any comfort to you, Dr. Ross, I can promise that any breakthroughs you come across, any further research you want to do, anything you produce in this work will be yours moving forward. It is the same deal I have with Tony Stark and Jane Foster, and I am willing to extend it to you.”

That seemed to ease some of the conflict as she considered this. “And I don’t have to sign onboard with SHIELD?”

“I can have you as a consultant, the same as Tony Stark.”

She nodded as she pondered. “I must say, his suits are rather impressive.”

“He certainly thinks so,” Peggy agreed, finally able to manage a bit of humor, despite herself.

Dr. Ross chuckled, scrubbing her face fitfully. She clearly still was torn, but had softened her stance, throwing up an arm in surrender. “All right, have your people send me files on what is going on. I can take a look tonight or tomorrow and make assessments. I may have to come up to New York to take a look. Do you think you can set me up somewhere?”

“Absolutely,” Peggy affirmed, unwilling to admit she would put the woman up at the most expensive hotel in the city on her own dime if it meant waking Steve.

That didn’t stop the scientist from looking as if she had made the worst mistake of her life. “You know, I hate New York. I mean, not just after the Harlem incident, but I really hate that city, the cabs, the subway, how rude people are, just...everything.”

“There is a Marriott two blocks from the headquarters. I will put you up there so you can see as few people as possible.”

At that, the woman finally did chuckle, half in disbelief, half in apparent amusement. “You are serious about getting me there?”

“As serious as my life,” Peggy responded without an ounce of humor. Her heart ached as she said it, thinking of Steve in his cryogenic sleep.

Dr. Ross studied her for long moments, intrigued and perhaps a bit surprised. “You really do love him, don’t you?”

“More than you will ever now,” Peggy affirmed, softly.

“I think I do know,” she sighed, something wistful and understanding in her words. “I understand it perhaps all too well.”

Perhaps Betty Ross did at that.

“Thank you,” Peggy offered, quietly, without histrionics or effusion. “This...means everything to me.”

“I get it,” she assured Peggy, a wealth of meaning in her somber expression. “I do, as long as you promise that none of this research will go into any more of these experiments, I’ll do what I can.”

Peggy would have cried with relief, if she could have. At the moment, she simply felt numb.

“Well,” she finally managed to gasp out. “I’ve taken up quite a lot of your time, and it is your holiday. I should perhaps leave you to your...relaxing.”

Dr. Ross looked as if she wanted to say something else profound, but ended up only nodding in agreement. “Sure.”

Despite the fact that she was still clothed in her warm, woolen coat and gloves, while Dr. Ross was in her pajamas, it was Peggy who felt naked and vulnerable as she rose, extending her hand to the other woman. “Thank you, Dr. Ross. I will do my best to see that you don’t regret helping.”

Dr. Ross took her hand, her firm grip similar to her father's. “Call me Betty. My students call me Dr. Ross and it just feels weird.”

“Then call me Peggy, please.” She felt that if this woman would help Steve in his recovery, the least she could do was to be a friend. “I’ll work on accommodations for you.”

“I’ll let you know tomorrow what my time table looks like.”

Peggy nodded, wanting to hug her but settling on pulling up a smile instead as she made her way to the door, Betty holding it for her. With waved farewells, she marched through the coating of snow to her car again, a giddiness suffusing her despite herself. As she climbed into her rental, she finally gave in to the mad desire to sob and laugh all at the same time.

After so many years...this is what hope actually felt like.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peggy struggles with her commitments.

Betty Ross was true to her word. She arrived by the end of the week, eyeing everything about SHIELD with hardly concealed antipathy and wariness.

“This is just your New York office?” She had balked, somewhat, at the full security at the doors and the body scan they had requested before she could follow Peggy towards Steve’s lab.

“Just the New York one, yes. There are SHIELD offices all over the world, though from what I understand the one in Washington DC is the biggest.”

Betty nodded, eyes flickering to the photographs on the far wall. “Is that Howard Stark over there?”

Peggy glanced at it mildly, knowing all too well Howard’s photogenic smile, one that he had perfected for cameras far before she had met him. “Yes, that would be him. He helped to found SHIELD.”

“Seriously?” Betty blinked as the elevator opened. “Tony Stark’s father?”

“We came up with the idea after one too many drinks once I had cleared his name of treason.” Peggy liked to think that was what happened, at least. She had always sworn that it was the only way to explain why it was that they thought SHIELD was a brilliant idea in the first place. “Howard didn’t trust the government with his experimental weapons, and he certainly didn’t trust them to destroy them. After two world wars based on nationalism and backroom deals, and facing a Cold War where one-upmanship was the name of the game, we both felt as if having an entity like SHIELD was needed, removed from the singular control of one nation with its own agenda.”

Peggy could see Betty’s gaze shift to the picture of her, with her hair coiffed neatly in her pin-curls, stylish and glamorous by modern standards. “And the two of you came up with his over drinks?”

Peggy could only smile, tightly. “Yes, well, it had been a rather long few weeks and Howard owed me quite a bit at that point. He humored me with my mad idea and supported me in it, and the two of us met with Phillips over it.” She pointed to the portrait of the colonel hanging on the other side of Howard. “Thankfully, Phillips was so used to our insane notions that he hardly blinked an eye at it and helped us push it through the right channels. It was a team effort, as they say, hardly singularly my work alone.”

The woman beside her seemed to weigh that as the lift doors opened. “You are quick to shift that credit away from you.”

“Only because it wasn’t just my credit.” Peggy shrugged as she gave the AI the floor to go down to. Betty didn’t seem phased as the computer identified her before sinking slowly down.

“Still, you had a lot to do with it. That’s something a lot of people like me remember.”

Peggy flushed slightly, reading the subtext there easily enough and choosing to let it lie for now. The story that had grown up around her and her role with both Captain America and SHIELD felt like half fairy tale, half wishful thinking, a story that involved a version of her, but about as true as the Captain America comic books were accurate reflections of Steve’s life. “It seemed like a practical solution to a pressing problem.”

Betty chose not to comment on that further.

All was well as Peggy led her to the lab. Dr. Young waited, expectant as she made to greet Betty with cool professionalism. “Welcome, Dr. Ross, glad you could come on board.”

The other woman smiled shyly, but firmly. “Glad I could as well. What do we got?”

“Well...the patient is asleep.” Dr. Young’s wry sense of humor cut through the tension of a new meeting, bringing Betty along with her. “From what we can tell of Captain Roger’s vitals, everything is running so slowly that one would be forgiven in assuming he was dead. His metabolism is practically at zero, but it’s there.”

“What is his blood pressure?”

“Slow but faint. How his blood didn’t crystallize in stasis, I don’t even know.”

Betty looked thoughtful as she studied Steve in his glass chamber. “What’s his body weight at the moment, muscle mass, the vital statistics?”

“Over here,” Dr. Young waved to her computer, bringing Betty with her. Peggy watched them go, pulling up data as other scientists gathered to listen. It was, Peggy realized, the sort of brainstorming session she would be useless at. All the pieces floating all around her - Steve in his coma, the truth of the threat that was out there, and the future of the Avengers - none of them resolved and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.

Without further comment, Peggy left them to her work, unsettled and frustrated and itching to do something, have something work, to get some answer.

No sooner had the elevator deposited her on her floor than her phone buzzed in her pocket, her hand going to it automatically. Fumbling with it as she rushed to pull it out, she barely caught it before it went to the voice message. “Carter?”

“When did you get a British butler answering your phone?”

Peggy hadn’t looked at who was calling - admittedly, she often forgot phones could do that now - but she recognized immediately the voice on the other end - and she knew he had left several messages for her over the last few weeks she had yet to answer back. “I believe you are talking to JARVIS, the AI who I’ve had recently installed in my flat.”

Juan Machado only paused a moment at the insanity of her last statement. “So...is that like Siri or something? I just got that on my new phone, and she is both super helpful and super creepy.”

Peggy only understood the idea of the voice-activated system on phones from the television commercials playing of late. “He is close...I suppose. Stark is the one who installed him. I can’t say I understand the particulars, but yes, he is based off a British butler who used to work for the family.”

“Stark? Like...Tony Stark?”

Peggy rolled her eyes as she meandered through the mostly empty floor towards her office. “It’s not precisely a secret that I know him.”

“Well, no, but still...he’s installing computer butlers in your apartment, which means he must like you!”

Peggy could tell he was fishing. “He is quite taken with Pepper Potts, Juan, so don’t go making trouble where there isn’t any.”

“So that is real, then, the whole secretary-to-lover, give her all the company cliche? I mean, they seem pretty serious, off at the Seychelles, on his private yacht, staying at an exclusive island, just the two of them...alone.”

“You, sir, are a gossip!”

“I don’t deny this,” he defended himself, gleefully unapologetic. “So, the party tonight, just making sure you were coming. Since you have been dodging my calls for the last month, I wasn’t sure what was up with you. Julio says you’ve been MIA and…”

Peggy froze at her desk, her frazzled memory catching up through the last four weeks of crisis and reaction. Today was Saturday, wasn’t it...New Year’s Eve. A party, Juan and his partner Julio’s annual party. Bloody hell, she had promised to go, hadn’t she?

“And Sharon said she’s out of town, and I didn’t know if you were with her or…”

“Juan,” she cut in over his chatter, her heart already sinking as guilt clawed through her middle. “I’m sorry, I’m rather glad you checked in, but I won’t be able to make it.”

“Peggy, don’t you dare be that way!”

“I’m sorry, it’s just been...mad at work of late.” It wasn’t precisely a lie, she reasoned, frowning at the piles of files, notes to herself, a half-written email to Jane Foster sitting on her computer screen.

“What is it this time? A terrorist attack?”

“No…”

“A crisis in another country?”

Peggy sighed in exasperation. “No!”

“Is it the Avengers? I bet it has something to do with that!”

That brought Peggy up short. “How do you know about that?”

“Seriously, Papí is not half as sneaky as he thinks he is. I figured out my Christmas present six months ago. I acted surprised so he wouldn’t get his feelings hurt, perks of working in the theater world.”

“Juan…”

“Also, he talks in his sleep. But anyway, the Avengers, so this is a thing, right?”

Peggy pressed the heel of her free hand against the bridge of her nose, unsure who she wished to kill first, Julio Vargas, her liaison in the mayor’s office, or Juan. “You really can’t be discussing this, Juan. There are a lot of...layers to this that I am working through, all of which are hanging on some very precarious threads at the moment.”

That got through to him, clearly, as she could almost hear the wheels clicking. His response was much more sober. “Look, I know, it’s serious stuff you are dealing with, Peggy, I get it. I know you can’t talk about most of it, too, but I’m your friend. I worry about you. We haven’t seen you in weeks and Sharon says you got drama going on, and then I call and get your British butler AI and no response out of you. Papí says he doesn’t know what’s up, but I know he’s not going to tell me if you don’t. I just want to make sure you are okay. It’s not like you to not answer when a friend is checking in.”

Peggy thought of Angie and the many times she had done precisely that to her. “Sometimes I get wrapped up in things. There is a lot going on right now and I need to be on top of it. That said, I’m glad you cared enough to check up on me, believe me, I am, it’s just…”

She trailed off, unsure of how to even begin to explain any of this. Never mind the Avengers piece of it all, she had never explained to either Juan or Julio the truth of who she was or how she got there, of why she ended up on that particular block right down from their apartment complex, or what her past even was. Why all of this was important, the role she played in it, even Steve’s situation would make no sense to them because she hadn’t bothered to explain. As a spy she had never once thought twice of lying about who she was, excluding aspects of her past for expediency and efficiency. It was very different when one was an operative trying to build real friendships and relationships beyond the world she worked in everyday.

Worse still, it was a lie to someone who was her first friend in this new world. Juan had been the one who found her that New Year’s morning, disoriented and confused, and had taken her in to his home, no questions asked. Julio had been more worried about her than Juan had. He’d fussed over her, ensured her safety, and then driven her to SHIELD, with...well, relatively few questions asked. He had been nothing but kind to her, ignoring her occasional bemusement with modern society and confusion at references that seemed to be second nature to nearly everyone else in this strange world. He had taken Peggy at face value.

And much like she had with Angie before, she had been less than truthful with him.

“Busy?” Juan's lone word cut through her meandering, hard and pointed. There was a world of hurt, worry and concern in that singular word. Peggy winced.

“Juan...I promise, perhaps in the next week or so, when things slow down, I can do brunch with you and Julio, catch you up on everything.”

There was a long beat and a small sigh on the other end of the line. “Sure...I’m sure you and Papí can catch up on your secret spy stuff since it’s all so important and all.”

“Juan…”

“I get it, Peg, I do! I mean, this is a crazy life, I knew that the moment I met you, but you know you have friends too. Just...remember us once in a while, huh? I mean, I can’t complain when the world is at stake and things like that, but you got people who want you in their life. I wouldn’t have invited you if I didn’t want you here.”

That was true...and she felt like an utter heel.

“Look, I got to go, got caterers on the line and I sent Papí to the store and God knows if he’s going to get what I want, so...I got to go check on that.”

“Of course,” Peggy murmured, seeing a brush off from a mile away. She supposed she couldn’t blame him, after all, she had brushed him off first.

“Call me next week? You, not your robot butler, okay?”

“Of course,” she smiled, weakly, as Juan cut off the call with a clipped “bye”.

Peggy frowned at her phone, setting it down on her desk. She had forgotten, that was all. Could one blame her? Every waking thought, every moment of the last four weeks had been focused on two things - the Avengers and Steve frozen in the basement below. It was completely understandable she would have it slip her mind, really.

The threads of her carefully built life, constructed over the weeks and months - years, now - of her time in the future was starting to unravel, a thread pulled too taut, snapping and shredding everything she had put together. Steve was still in a coma, the Avengers were stalled, she had no idea what threat was coming at them and no way of explaining it, and she had now just pushed off her first friend in this time in the same manner she used to treat Angie, something she vowed she would never do.

How she longed for the old diner, a cup of coffee, a piece of pie, and Angie’s chattering gossip of the day.

No sooner than the thought came to mind than her phone was in her hand, Angie’s number ringing through. It took a surprisingly short time for her oldest friend to pick up, an older woman in a cultured, theater trained tone answering. “Hello?”

“Happy New Year, Angie!”

“English!” All pretense of her accent dropped, the girl from the Bronx coming out once more. “How are things with Captain America? Have you woken him up yet?”

Trust Angie to get to the heart of things. To her surprise, tears misted Peggy’s eyes as she leaned back in her office chair, missing her friend so very much. “They are still working on it, but I think we got the right person for the job in there. Hopefully soon.”

“You did promise to bring him by to see me and I’m holding you to that.”

Peggy chuckled, wetly. “All the movie stars you worked with over all the years and you still have a crush on Steve Rogers?”

“You’ve seen the man without his shirt on and you ask me that question?”

Peggy’s cheeks flamed, wishing somewhat she hadn’t told Angie that particular memory, but snorting in laughter all the same. “How was your Christmas?”

“Loud! All the kids in, grandkids too. It was good to see them, but it was better to see them go.”

Peggy knew that wasn’t totally true, Angie doted on her family. “I’m glad you got to see all of them. How is Lauren? She got that big part yet?”

“Turns out it was a bit part on some television show, the love interest. May turn into something. Like I tell her, you do enough of these small things, big things will come through. She’s my granddaughter, after all, she’s got the flair for the dramatic.”

“If she’s half as stubborn as you, she’ll make it.” Peggy had no doubt that Angie’s granddaughter would. After all, Angie herself had refused to let go of Peggy and their friendship, despite how hard Peggy had fought her on it. That brought her full circle to the purpose of her call in the first place.

“How did you screw up this time, English?”

She should have known Angie would clue into it sooner rather than later. “You guessed?”

“Don’t get to be my age without having a bit of wisdom in your back pocket. Besides, I know you too well. You wouldn’t be Peggy Carter if you weren’t saving the world and trying to protect people . But I also know how you get when the world is on fire and you think you are the only one who can fix it. So...what is it?”

“All of the above?”

“You do have a talent, Peggy, I’m not going to lie. What happened?”

“Nothing,” she murmured, trying to encapsulate her last month in one word. “Everything...I feel as if I am spinning plates, trying to keep each one going and failing woefully at all of them. Steve...my work...things are coming, I know they are and I can’t do anything to stop it.”

“What sort of things?”

Peggy wish it weren’t so absurdly strange as aliens and outer space. “It’s...classified. You know how it is.”

To her relief, Angie snorted on the other end of the line, followed by a rueful laugh. “It always is with you, English. You picked a hell of a field to get into.”

“I wish it were different.” It was the same lament she voiced to Angie years ago.

Angie’s sniff on the other end of the line was as dubious as it had been in 1946. “Do you?” 

“It would certainly make things easier.”

“Easy was never your style, English. You always liked tackling the hard things. Why wait for someone else to save the world when you could do it yourself.”

“You say that as if it is a bad thing!”

“It’s not,” Angie quietly defended herself. “But the world wouldn’t need saving if it were something easy. And frankly, I think you’d get bored with easy. Otherwise you’d have stayed with that fellow you were supposed to marry, settled down, had some kids, become a housewife.”

“All well and true, but doesn’t fix my current predicament.” Frustrated, she threw herself back into her chair, snagging a pen from atop the desk to twiddle between her fingers. “You would think that for a woman who willingly threw herself into the future to help stop something horrible happening I would have stopped for five minutes and asked for details, gotten at least a date, or a sequence of events, or warning signs, or something. Instead, I agreed to this hair-brained scheme and ended up two years before I was even supposed to land, while Lang ended up…”

She paused, blinking at the window of her office and the frigid sight of Times Square three blocks from where SHIELD headquarters sat on 46th Street. If she could squint, she could see the set up for the giant, ball dropping ceremony they held there every December 31st.

“Peggy?”

“It’s New Year’s Eve,” she muttered, her brain whirling so fast it nearly made her dizzy.

“Yeah, it is. You just wished me happy New Year.”

“No, I mean it’s New Year’s Eve...the year I was supposed to land.” The year that Scott Lang was supposed to be heading. “I think I can catch him.”

“Catch who,” Angie queried, utterly confused.

“The man who got me into all of this mess in the first place!”

“I don’t understand…”

“I know, darling, and I will call you tomorrow and explain more.”

Without any further explanation, Peggy clicked off her call, grabbing her coat and bag, making for the exit, finally having a plan.


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peggy confronts some of her past choices.

It was strange, for Peggy, standing in front of her old address. The spot where her cozy flat had once been had long ago disappeared, an empty lot when she had first landed in this new century. In the two years since something new had risen in its place, a brick and glass commercial building, with a quaint bakery and coffee shop on its bottom floor, windows filled with signs welcoming the new year. Near midnight, it was well closed, as were most of the other offices around her. Even the apartment buildings were quiet, save for the occasional house parties she could see and hear through open windows, all letting the frigid in air into stuffy rooms. Peggy curled her hands around her own thermos of coffee and waited.

She’d dressed for the wait, at least, donning the familiar, old warm tactical gear she had brought from 1949. Wrapped up in her woolen overcoat on top of that, she perched on a blanket on the top of a set of concrete steps, watching the store, waiting for...something. She wasn’t sure what it even would look like. On that New Year’s so long ago, Lang had already landed in that back alley by Howard’s old penthouse long before she happened upon him. Would he simply pop into existence here and now, like a magician’s trick, or would he shimmer into formation, like some sort of special effect in the television shows Peggy had caught from time-to-time. She had no idea. Perhaps it wouldn’t happen outside at all. They had been inside her flat at the time they had shrunk to nothingness. Chances were high he would end up inside in one of the offices, confused and by himself and wondering what had happened.

That was the same question she had been asking since 2010 herself.

She settled in for her long wait. She had brought her phone, of course, as one could not be away from it in these modern times and she had no idea what sort of situation she might find herself in that may potentially need back up. She had her warm drink in hand, a few snacks in her pockets, and a good book and light on her lap. If she closed her eyes, perhaps shut out the sound of traffic and sirens on the road, she could almost pretend she was out in the field again, staking out a target in the long hours of the night, waiting for something - anything to happen. Only, Mr. Jarvis was no longer there to stammer worriedly about the time or the expense of Howard’s borrowed car.

And so her long wait began.

At midnight, the alarm she had set on her phone went off, just as the house parties in the apartments around her began to pop off, shouting and cheering, here and there a faint chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” carried on the frozen breeze. Peggy watch the front of the building intensely, waiting for something strange to appear, the ghostly figure of Scott Lang in his ridiculous suit appearing at a window. It didn’t. What time had he set on that ridiculous device? She perhaps could have checked it before she left. It was locked, securely, in the safe in her flat. She had barely looked at it since she had put it there two years before. It was silly, really, but she had feared doing so, as if touching it might irrevocably distort time itself before she had a chance to come here to do what she needed.

So she continued to wait, reading on. She watched as, here and there, tipsy and loud partygoers wandered out to the sidewalks, hailing cabs and wandering by in small clusters of twos and threes. Few paid her any attention, drunk and laughing as many of them were. She did eye one particularly unfortunate young lady in her early twenties, so intoxicated she was being held between two friends. Peggy said something as they wandered past her, and they assured her they were all roommates who lived two blocks over and would be fine getting her home. She observed them till they made it to the apartments down the street, though the poor young lady had to relieve her overtaxed stomach right into a planter containing a tree in it. She would likely be regretting her life choices in the morning.

One o’clock in the morning rolled by and there was still no sign of Scott Lang.

Peggy finished her book by then, sighing as she tucked it into her coat pocket. Cassandra had suggested Graham Greene, having seen several adaptations of his work, which led her to read his stories. Peggy found she rather enjoyed the one she had picked up, tying the connections between her own knowledge of the intelligence community of the period with the events of the novel and what happened in the years that followed. The CIA always did manage to make a hash out of everything they got their hands on. That was one reason, among many, she, Howard and Phillips had fought so hard to create SHIELD all those years ago, to be an agency outside and above the sort of nationalistic fervor that had surrounded the already overly-heated intelligence community at that period. The camps had formed rapidly after the meetings in Yalta and had only solidified once the war had ended, with all reason and good sense flying out the window no sooner than America and the Soviets realized again they didn’t like each other at all. SHIELD was supposed to be beyond that, to counter that - at least that had been the idea. 

Her thoughts led her, unerringly, to her current predicament with Gideon Malick, and his meddling in the Avengers Initiative. Had the situation been 1949, Peggy would have been mobilizing to get people like Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, and yes, even Steve Rogers into SHIELD, if nothing else to keep them out of the hands of one particular government over the other, fearful of what sort of human arms race it could possibly lead to. Now, Malick and those who sided with him hardly seemed to care in the worry of the unpredictability of what sort of people they were. Heroes or not, they were determined to see them as a threat. Why? When Steve had been changed all those years ago, no one had thought to fear him. Phillips only regret was that the serum formula had died with Erskine and that there wouldn’t be more soldiers like Steve. Senator Brandt certainly had salivated at the thought of there being whole platoons of men with Steve’s capabilities. Now, the likes of Malick and those who supported him feared it. The truth of why wasn’t particularly clear, save that human beings were far harder to control in a situation than say weapons systems. Just what sort of projects had Malick pushed forward, and just what was Coulson working on in New Mexico?

Two o’clock had come and gone by the time Peggy looked at the time again. She frowned, standing up to stretch and wander a bit. The streets had become mostly quiet after the stroke of midnight, most revelers either having settled down or wandered home for the night. In the distance she could hear stragglers, but no one wandered past her old neighborhood, not even the police. That thought had her checking beneath her clothes for her weapon, secure that it was in place and she was safe from anyone who might harass her on this cold night. She studied the darkened interior of the new building briefly, wondering if perhaps she was wrong, perhaps Lang wouldn’t appear here. If he didn’t, where did he go? Where did he end up? Had something happened to him?

That thought left her in a spiral of worried and uncomfortable anxiety, the image of his daughter - hadn’t her name been Cassie, too - floating to the front of her mind. Peggy had been more awed by the device that Lang had produced, having never seen the ubiquitous cellular phones before in her life, but she still remembered the bright-eyed, playful girl he had shown her, the clear pride and joy on Lang’s face, as well as the heartbreaking regret, as he told Peggy of what had happened, of how he had disappeared in an accident, only to reappear five years later to a world where his little girl had been left without her father, most of her family, just her mother. Peggy’s heart had ached to see the sight. It was his Cassie that had finally convinced Peggy to go along with his crazy scheme and jump forward in time. The idea that Lang could be lost once again, his daughter left without her beloved father, all because of Peggy, ached horribly inside of her chest. He would have to appear, wouldn’t he? Perhaps something else happened? Perhaps he arrived and she hadn’t seen him and he simply just went back home. Perhaps he got back to his time safe and sound. But then again, he had pulled her forward in the hopes she would change things, make the world different from the one he had experienced. Perhaps that meant that the existence he had known before was gone now, altered forever, perhaps to a happier one. The logic of trying to parse out that idea made her head ache. She had no idea how time worked, she doubted anyone short of Tony Stark and possibly Jane Foster would understand it. Perhaps she should bring it up to them.

Three o’clock came and went. Four o’clock was on them. The air was so cold her breath was an icy vapor. She burrowed further into her layers of thermals and warm clothes, her coat and blanket wrapped firmly around her. This was insanity, she told herself, continuing to watch the business, even as her back ached and her eyes drooped. She could just go home to a hot shower, a warm bath, and the welcome voice of JARVIS inquiring on how her night's events went. Instead, she sat there stubbornly, half fearful that if she left then Lang would appear and she’d have missed him. What would she do? Wait all day for him? What if he showed up at noon out of a clear blue sky. Would he have sense enough to try looking for her somewhere? Perhaps she would go to SHIELD. Perhaps he would go to the police, and they would think he was insane, or at the very least an escaped convict. Wasn’t he in prison now? Something about defrauding a company. Peggy had no idea how he ended up from his current predicament to being a man in a technologically advanced suit able to time travel, but she hadn’t meddled, for fear that whatever his future path held, he wouldn’t be able to find it without this experience. Perhaps, though, he might have found it all the same if she had. Who knew how fate worked. Would she have always been meant to be who and what she was? Would Steve have always become the hero he did even if he hadn’t run across Abraham Erskine? If she had stayed in the past, what would her life have been? What would have SHIELD become.

The cold was making her dopey and philosophical, she decided...that or the sleep that her body was desperately craving at the moment. Her head kept dropping, her chin falling to her chest as her eyes fluttered, weighed down as if by sand. She jerked awake at the sound of a passing car, making its way slowly down the street, but it didn’t stop and she found her eyes sinking once again. The sound of something clattering brought her awake again, but when a scamp of a dog ran around the corner and down the sidewalk, she relaxed again, leaning against the brick wall that linked the side of the steps she sat on. Her eyes slid shut once more, her breathing slowed.

She was clearly woefully out of practice if she fell asleep on a stake out like this.

“Peggy?”

Gentle fingers tapped, warm against her cold cheeks.

“Peggy, please don’t be dead!”

Peggy roused, only slightly, confused and half-frozen, her neck and back stiff with the temperature and the position she was in. It took her far longer than it should have to realize where she was and what was going on, her eyes snapping open with the insistent, desperate patting on her cheek and the gentle shaking of her shoulder. Scott Lang! The future! She was waiting on him, he had to tell her what was going on, he had..

She turned her head, helping at the crick that had formed, expecting the person accosting her to be Lang in his strange suit. To her disappointment...or relief, perhaps...she frowned up sleepily into the face of Juan Machado, who leaned over her in vague worry and terror.

“Dear Jesus, thank God! I was afraid I’d have to call Sharon and tell her you were dead. She would kill me.”

“No,” Peggy croaked, trying to sit up more fully despite protesting muscles. “No, not dead. Just an idiot.” She sat up, looking up and down the block where her old flat had been. It was full dawn now, golden sunlight filtering in over the cold and quiet street. Everyone it seemed was having a bit of a lie-in after the revelries save Juan, who was still watching Peggy warily, confused as to the state she was in.

“I keep finding you around here on New Year’s Day, half frozen and a hot mess. What in the hell were you doing last night? And why was it more important than our party?”

Juan’s deluge of questions was valid, but all she could do was eye him up and down in his tight fitting workout clothes and puffy winter coat and croak out, bleakly. “What time is it?”

“Seven-thirty, and I didn’t want to be up, but my husband is a sadist who will wake up at 6:00 am even on a holiday after throwing a rather amazing and tasteful party, which you missed out on because you told me you had too much going on. And now I find you sitting out here like a druggy, again. So, care to tell me what the hell is really going on, Peggy, or you just blowing off your friends for the hell of it?”

Peggy didn't dare look at the hurt, disappointment, and confusion she knew would be on her friend's face right now. He was right, she knew he was right, but she still looked up and down the street, frantically, hoping she could see Lang there, wandering somewhere. “You didn’t happen to see a strange man walking around here, did you?”

“Midtown Manhattan and you don’t think I see strange men wandering around here on a daily basis?”

Peggy rolled her eyes, groaning as she sat up, loathe to admit he had a point. “Stranger than usual. He would be wearing a strange suit, sort of like a motorcycle suit...like the one I was wearing when you found me.”

That gave her friend pause. “Peggy...what’s this all about? And don’t tell me it’s classified, because you are hanging out here like last time. Clearly it’s important, else you wouldn’t be here.”

She found herself frantically improvising on the spot, standing up on stiff legs, yelping as the blood began to flow. “I had a contact I was supposed to be meeting here, but he never showed.”

Juan arched one dark eyebrow at her dubiously. “A contact at the same spot I found you at?”

Peggy flushed, swallowing her guilt. “It was convenient.”

“Right,” he drawled, eyeing her from head-to-toe as she stood there, cold, miserable, in desperate need of a toilet and a cup of hot coffee, frustrated that what she had thought was a good plan had somehow failed utterly. “Well, since you are here, come on up with me to the apartment. I can get you coffee and then I want to know what’s going on here and why you’ve been so cagey for the last month.”

It was on the tip of Peggy’s tongue to protest, that she needed to wait for Lang, but the look on Juan’s face, coupled with her own pressing needs, made her relent. “All right, then.”

Without a word, Juan turned towards the block where his apartment was, not ten minutes away.

Peggy could have cried at the warmth of his building, her cheeks burning as the heat began to thaw out her skin. She stumbled behind her friend, up the floors to his flat that he shared with his partner, Julio Vargas. Peggy had fell in with them both that fateful day, two good Samaritans. Juan had open and caring and dragging her in like a lost puppy to feed and coddle. Julio had been far more circumspect, well used to his partner’s open-hearted tendencies and more cautious about the type of people Juan brought home. That said, after the initial wariness and strangeness of their introduction, Peggy had gotten to know the pair and counted them as two of her dearest friends.

Which was why her guilt at lying to them both sat heavily in her stomach as she trailed after Juan into his warm, well-lit flat.

In the kitchen she could hear Julio banging about, the smell of cooking food and fresh coffee filling the space, making Peggy’s mouth water and her stomach grumble, loudly. She unwound herself from the many layers she’d been wrapped up in, depositing her blanket, coat, hat and and other outwear on the hooks beside their door.

“Why don’t you go get cleaned up a bit, then you meet us in the kitchen to talk,” Juan ordered, gently but firmly, shoving her lightly towards the hall. Peggy went, stumbling past the many framed posters and playbills for shows Juan had worked costuming on, making her way to the restroom where she could stop and take a shaky breath. She had been so sure...so sure that Lang would appear. Wasn’t he supposed to come now? Hadn’t they meant to arrive on this date? Why hadn’t he come? Where had he gone?

Her hands stung with the hot water that ran over them as she washed, then splashed some on her face. The water cleared much of the confused and frozen sleepiness she felt, as she blinked at her reflection. The traces of her make up for the day before were smudged and gray. Frankly, she looked no better than many of the party goers she saw the night before, with dark circles under her dark eyes and tight lines of exhaustion, cold, and anxiety around mouth. No wonder Juan was worried, she looked like hell. What would she even tell him, much less Julio? The latter had her worrying the most. Over the summer, Julio had become her liaison with the mayor’s office on the matter of the Avengers, a political move born out of the double incidents involving Stark and Banner. How could she explain what was coming without proof? How could she explain the mess around the Avengers? How could she explain the mess she had made of all of it?

If only she could stay in their bathroom and hide for the rest of the day.

Eventually, however, her rumbling stomach overrode her nerves as she opened the door to step back out. She found the pair chatting in kitchen, a space that was normally nice and neat in Peggy’s experience, but which currently looked as if every one of their dishes had been used for their soirée the night before. Despite this, a singular, unused plate sat at an open space across from Juan, two pancakes sitting on it, with a cup of the Cuban style coffee Julio often made. She settled at the spot while Juan sipped at his own coffee, carefully studying her, Julio quietly bustling around behind him, filling their dishwasher with the detritus of their party; plates and silverware, bowls and cooking spoons.

“Your party must have been a good one,” she offered, diplomatically, with a small smile to Juan.

“You’d have known if you’d been here.”

Peggy sighed, nodding, daring to snag her coffee cup, wrapping her still chilled fingers gratefully around it. “I told you I couldn’t.”

“So, what, you sat out all night on a street corner doing what?”

“A stake out,” she replied easily enough, considering it was true.

“In the same spot I found you when I met you?”

“Yes.” She sipped at the coffee, sweet, thick, and warm, and tried not to gulp it down to heat up her insides.

“Looking for some funny-dressed guy?”

“Yeah,” she sighed, wondering how to even get out of this conundrum. She looked to Julio, who had been studiously filling the dishwasher, but now had closed it and set it, wiping his damp hands on a dishtowel slung over his shoulder. He eyed her back, shrugging, both as curious as Juan and as wary as herself. He hadn’t knowingly told Juan about the Avengers - at least she didn’t think he had - but she knew he was curious about all of this and the situation she found herself in. In fairness, he was the one person outside of SHIELD who should be made aware of the predicament.

Mulling over the situation, she sighed, setting aside her coffee to reach for the nearby bottle of syrup, pouring a drizzle neatly over the pancakes. The pair at least were polite enough to allow her to take several bites, as her brain spun on what to even say or how to begin. She supposed, she considered, wryly, the best place to start was at the beginning. 

So she did.

To their credit, neither said much during her long and sordid tale. That said, it was difficult to read either of them as she brought up the truth of her past, time travel, and everything that had come after. When she finished, she sat staring at her half eaten breakfast, tracing syrup around the rim of the plate with one fork tine, afraid to look at either of them.

An uncomfortable silence rank for long moments, broken only by the click of the dishwasher as it finished its cycle. Even then, they both sat, unmoving, as Peggy resisted to throw her fork down just to break the tension. Instead, she set it carefully across the plate.

“Do you have anything to say? That I’m...insane, that I lied to you, that I was impetuous and stupid in doing what I did?”

Perhaps she desperately wanted someone to say those things to her, just to feel validated in them herself.

Unsurprisingly, it was Juan who sat up first, grabbing his phone to rise. “I need to step away for a second. Just...give me a moment.”

Without any more preamble than that, he moved around Julio and out of their kitchen, down the hall to their bedroom, Peggy presumed. She watched him go, miserably, knowing she had hurt Juan and his trusting soul. She waited at least till she heard the quiet slam of a door before she let her shoulders slump.

Julio still sat, quietly circumspect, watching the hallway with aching eyes. “You got to give him a bit. He...doesn’t deal with this sort of thing well.”

Peggy couldn’t name a person who would. “You are relatively calm.”

Julio shrugged, reaching for her uneaten food, disposing of it tidily. “Can I confess something to you?”

His question was frank, but wary. “Bigger than the fact that I just told you I’m from 1949 and that the Avengers Initiative is a complete mess?”

“Maybe not that big,” he chuckled, rinsing her plate and setting it aside to put into his next load of dishes. “I may have already guessed at some of it...a little. I wasn’t sure how to explain it, but yeah, I knew some of it.”

That did bring Peggy up short. “How?”

He turned, leaning against the sink. “When you got here, you were talking about SHIELD. Not everyday a SHIELD operative shows up in our neighborhood. And yeah, maybe I am a bit paranoid. When you work for the city, you sort of learn to be careful. Anyway, I know some people over with the NYPD, obviously, and the only Peggy Carter tied to SHIELD that popped up was you...or, well, you know, the one who disappeared in 1949.”

It shouldn’t have surprised her that Julio would have been the one looking into it, but somehow it did. “And you never said anything?”

“No, because I thought it was a coincidence. I mean, there is another Julio Varga who works with the city business office, and a Juan Machado in the parks department. Things like that happen. Hearing you and Sharon talk, I figured she was some distant aunt, maybe.”

“I’m actually Sharon’s distant aunt,” Peggy huffed, sadly. “She’s my brother’s granddaughter.”

“Knew you were related. You two have the same exact expressions, you know.” He slid his hands into the pockets of his athletic trousers, his dark brows furrowing. “So what is this all with the Avengers, Peggy? We’ve been working on this for months.”

“I know,” she muttered, propping her elbows on the counter, planting her forehead in her palms and thrusting her fingers through her tangled hair, clutching it in consternation. “It’s all Gideon Malick.”

“The businessman?”

“Yes,” Peggy hissed, releasing her hair to prop her chin on her curled fingers instead. “He is one of the members of the World Security Council overseeing SHIELD. He’s essentially having a battle of wills with the secretary, Alexander Pierce, and the Avengers Initiative is one of the pieces they seem to be quibbling over.”

“Why?”

“They say it is money, but I suspect it is fear. We are dealing with superheroes, here, people with the capability to do things other people can’t. There are those who find that...frightening, I guess.”

Julio snorted, giving a sad smile. “Hey, I know a thing or two about people being afraid and distrustful of who I am. People being scared of the likes of Stark and that Hulk dude doesn’t shock me. People get scared of things for less.”

It was true and it was heartbreaking and maddening. “Admittedly, I’ve never heard of you getting in a fight that was bad enough we needed to declare a state of emergency.”

“True enough, I was the nerdy, straight-laced boy who wouldn’t step a toe out of line so as not to draw too much attention to himself.” His grin was sharp, but also self-reproachful. “Nito, though...when I met him, he was the spitfire, believe it or not. He was...angry about a lot of things. He didn’t have the sort of boring upbringing or supportive family I did. He’s mellowed out a lot...a lot. I mean, he’s still himself, wired like he’s surgically attached to his coffee mug, but less angry.”

That stabbed Peggy in the heart. “And I lied to him.” She knew something of her friend’s upbringing and how hard it was. He reminded her, in a way, of Tony Stark, another man who had grown up with a difficult and traumatic family situation. Truth was highly valued by him, and she knew it was prized by Juan as well.

“You know he’s probably on the phone with Sharon right now confirming your story, right? Once he’s processed a bit, he will come around.”

“I should have hired him for SHIELD,” she quipped. “Considering how much he’s obsessed with it.”

“I think I’d rather have him just where he is, thank you,” Julio smirked, shaking his dark head. “Knowing him, he’d get himself shot, and I would probably go to pieces without him.”

Peggy couldn’t help but smile at that and the clear love and affection between the two. “I don’t know, you are tough, Julio Vargas. You are tougher than you think. But I will make sure Juan stays in one piece, as much as I can.”

“Good luck with that,” he snorted, settling across from her again, his laughter sobering to seriousness in a second. “But back to the Avengers situation. You said something is coming. Got any idea of what?”

“Well...it’s extra-terrestrial.” She had mentioned that piece earlier, but in the deluge of time-travel, superheroes, and secret projects, she wasn’t sure what had sunk in and what had not. “That much I know. The nature of it, when it is happening, and the level of the threat, I can’t say, though I have people on it. It is obviously substantial, however, given the fact it was a notable enough event that it was supposed to bring the Avengers together.”

Julio nodded, scrubbing his face as he pondered, frowning vaguely in the distance. “All right, so are we talking like a terrorist level attack, like Stark, or like destroying Harlem level?”

“Yes,” she replied, shrugging. “I have no more information than that. If I did, I’d have already taken it to the World Security Council and demanded they approve every possible resource to the Avengers Initiative. I’m already fighting tooth and nail to make it happen anyway. The last thing we need is to be caught flatfooted.”

He hissed through his teeth at that thought. “Damn straight, we can’t. And between you and me, I’m not so sure I’m willing to wait for SHIELD to get off their asses to do something, not when it is the city I work for, and not when I’ve been charged to work with you on preparing for it.”

At least Julio was of the same mind as herself. “Then maybe you should work with the mayor to prepare as much as we can. You don’t have to give details, just say that SHIELD has assessed there is a credible threat, a large scale one that could affect large portions of the city. Begin drawing up contingency plans for something of that scale, various ones, depending on if the attack is aerial based or not, how do you evacuate large buildings safely, where do you take people to get them out, how do you clear streets and public transit to allow service workers to get through, et cetera.”

As she spoke, Julio pulled out his phone, his thumbs typing quickly across the glass, making notes to himself. “We will need to put in a plan with the local hospital networks to take in patients so no one is overwhelmed. If this is coming from the air, we will want to let the other burrows know, maybe also New Jersey, as it may be scattershot.”

Peggy shook her head, watching as he typed and brainstormed. “I just dropped time travel and aliens on you. How are you not kicking me out of your apartment right now and labeling me insane?”

His wry smile returned as he continued to type. “Peggy, no offense, but in the last year I’ve seen you handle Tony Stark in a metal suit fighting another dude in a metal suit, an angry, green monster tearing up Harlem, and whatever it was going on in New Mexico. And that’s just the stuff I know about. And considering the fact that every conspiracy, whack job I know of out there has a tin foil hat theory involving SHIELD and some weirdo science experiment they are running, I don’t know...perhaps it’s just easier to believe you and plan for the worst and hope we get through it than to think you’re crazy and get our asses handed to us because of it.”

Peggy hadn't been aware she needed to hear that, but apparently she did. “Thank you.”

Impulsively, he reached across the counter to take one of her hands, squeezing it gently. “We are your friends, Peggy. We are here to help and support you, no matter how crazy it gets. I mean, I get you can’t tell us everything, classified and all, but you don’t have to push us out when things get tough. And I’ll do what I can to at least get us put together on my end, even if SHIELD is dithering around about the Avengers.”

Down the hall, they could hear the sound of a door opening and the shuffling steps of Juan making his way back down. He stopped in the hallway, eyeing the two of them holding hands without comment. For a long moment, he silently glared at Peggy, then sighed.

“So, Sharon backs up your story, no matter how crazy it sounds. I guess you buy it, Julio?”

It was one of the rare times she ever heard Juan calling his partner by his actual first name. She turned to Julio warily, but he only squeezed her fingers once more, letting them go as he straightened and nodded firmly, meeting Juan’s eyes. “I do, Juanito. It’s crazy, but we’ve both heard of crazier things in this world. After all, we live in New York.”

Juan snorted at that, but didn’t lose his serious mien - a strange look on him - as he rounded to the counter again, facing Peggy directly. “I get it, why you didn’t say anything. I don’t know if I would if I were in your shoes. Still sucks that you did it.”

Peggy couldn’t help but think of Angie and their long ago conversation and how it mirrored this one in so many ways. One of these days, maybe, she might learn. “I know. I’m sorry.”

He seemed to accept her apology on face value, at the very least. “Truth means a lot to me. I didn’t get a lot of that growing up, except from my grandparents. I had a lot of people who pushed me away. I let you into my life because you seemed like good people, and I still think that you are. I get it, crazy situation, you work for, you know, the world’s biggest spy organization, you had insane shit happen. I don’t know if I still understand half of it, I don’t know if I want to understand it. You still seem like good people. You told us the truth just now, even though you could have made up something way more plausible than that. Clearly you value me and Julio. I’m willing to be forgiving and maybe move forward from this, if you promise not to cut us out again and to be as honest as you can...within reason, I mean, I know you still work for SHIELD.”

It was a huge step for her friend, she could tell from the tender look Julio shot him, the way he reached over to slip a hand over Juan's knee in comfort. Peggy, for her part, wished she had learned her lesson before with Angie. Perhaps she would always be learning that lesson regarding friendship and vulnerability.

“I promise I will do my best,” she replied, mindful she had made a similar promise long ago. “I can’t promise more than that. But I will try very hard not to.”

“Trying is better than not,” Juan agreed, softening somewhat. Perhaps all would eventually be forgiven.

“One day,” Peggy sighed, shaking her head. “I’ll have to introduce you to Angie Martin, the actress. She was my best friend when I first moved to New York, and she and I had a similar journey as I am having with you. She could perhaps tell you stories and empathize.”

Her name wasn’t lost of Juan, who lived and worked in the theater. “The Angie Martin? You know the Angie Martin?”

“Back in the day when she was Angie Martinelli, yes. She was my roommate, and a woman who was more understanding that I deserved. You remind me a lot of her.”

It was the sort of compliment that worked on Juan, who preened slightly, clearly now willing to forgive and move forward. “To be mentioned in the same breath as her for anything is an honor. But, you do realize, now I need to get the scoop on what she was like before she was famous.”

“I can do one better since I have her phone number and could just call her.”

Peggy might as well have said she could call the divine directly, judging from the rapturous expression on Juan's face. “Oh my God, seriously! I mean, not today, too much emotion today, but you can just call her?”

“I was her best friend when we were young, so yes.”

“This is crazy to me,” Juan shook his head, still trying to absorb all that he had heard, turning to Julio beside him. As usual his partner only grinned indulgently, and Peggy found it made her smile to see it, the clear affection they shared, despite all the storms of life. She couldn’t help but think of Steve in that moment, of her private hopes, of the aching sadness of lost time, of the uncertainty of what the future would hold for either of them or for their relationship.

Juan, with his usual exuberance, burst into her private thoughts. “So, now that your big secret is out, I have questions….and it’s rather a long list, so you may be here a while.”

Peggy opened her mouth to protest. She had no idea where Scott Lang was. Her long list of problems was still there, unresolved, and she was dying for a shower, possibly her own bed. But Julio shot Peggy a pointed look, and she knew that he was privately telling her she owed Juan this much, if not for lying to him for two years, certainly for skipping out on the party the night before.

“All right,” Peggy agreed, holding up her coffee cup. “I will need another of these to continue. Where would you like me to start?”

Julio quietly took her cup as Juan met her gaze, frankly, practically buzzing with excitement. “Let’s start with how you know Howard Stark, move to Captain America, and then to Angela Martin, and drop any other salacious details you got in there too.”

Peggy had a feeling Juan was going to spend the whole day making her pay for her transgressions. “I will absolutely need much more coffee.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In my mind's eye, Scott is now having an adventure where he realizes he lost Peggy and is trying to find her, popping up in different times...so, we may see her again? (*cough* maybe...*cough*) But that is a whole other time adventure which will likely give Steven Strange a massive headache at this point.


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peggy finds out how Steve survived.

Scott Lang never did appear.

Peggy looked for him. She checked the area of her old apartment after leaving Juan and Julio’s flat. Neither the police, who half suspected Peggy of being crazy, nor the hospital, who had seen all manner of strange things on New Year’s Eve, had seen or had any record of him. Peggy went so far as to check in with the front desk and security at the SHIELD headquarters to see if he appeared looking for her. Bemused, they informed her no one came in, as expected on a national holiday. No trace of the strange man who fell into her life was seen. 

It left Peggy vaguely concerned about what had happened to him, after all. He hadn’t been a dream, obviously, she was there and thus far much of what he said was at least plausible. That said, the only trace she could find was the man sitting in a California prison, oblivious to either her or the role he played in the future. What happened to the version of Scott Lang who came to her that night, where he was, what became of him, Peggy would likely never know. She hoped, desperately, that wherever he was, he somehow found himself back home, to his daughter, to his Hope, to the friends and family he had lost. Perhaps, in this world, she could somehow prevent the tragedy that befell to that Scott Lang, and ensure the Scott Lang in this world would never have to do anything so desperate or so foolish.

In the meantime...

“You told civilians the truth?” Cassandra glared at her as if Peggy had just admitted to kicking puppies.

“It’s not precisely the biggest secret in the entire world, all of SHIELD knows. Thaddeus Ross sussed it out. I’ve not exactly been keeping the truth quiet.”

“Still, that’s not just something you drop out there, that you are a time traveler who disappeared in 1949, and no, I’m not crazy.”

Peggy could only shrug mildly, privately grumbling that Cassandra was much more agitated by this than Peggy felt she had a right to be. “I had to say something to Betty Ross to get her here, and so I made the call.”

“Betty Ross isn’t who I worry about.”

“Juan and Julio?” Peggy arched a dubious look at her right-hand agent. “Julio is already working with us in conjunction with the mayor’s office. If I wasn’t honest with him, I would have lost all credibility with him and the city just at the moment we need it most. I can’t jeopardize that. As for Juan...he is my friend. He deserved that much out of me.”

Cassandra wasn’t particularly moved, but at least conceded some points. “Fair, at least on the Vargas issue. Still, it’s not precisely the thing I’d expect you to bandy around, particularly because it sounds insane.”

Peggy rolled her eyes as she traced the now familiar path to Steve’s lab, feeling Cassandra was being perhaps a smidge over dramatic and far too overprotective. “You’ve told your David some things, correct?”

Her point hit home as Cassandra pursed her lips into a guilty line. “Yes...admittedly.”

“Well, then,” Peggy breezed past the issue firmly. “Besides, I have a feeling that if Dr. Ross is successful the world will have a whole other time traveler they will care about far more than me.”

At that, she opened the door to the lab, eyeing Dr. Ross and Dr. Young, both standing by Steve’s pod in discussion. They clearly heard her steps, as both turned before she even greeted them.

“Good news, Director,” Betty opened with a smile, holding up a tablet as her fingers raced across the glass. “We’ve cracked the problem.”

Those simple words! Peggy’s heart soared.

“It was so obvious, I feel rather like an idiot,” Dr. Young admitted with a deprecating smile, nodding to Betty with clear admiration. “She found it relatively quickly. I would never have even thought of it, even considered it possible.”

“How could you? The reliable data on the super soldier programs is sparse and much of it redacted, particularly the experiments the Army performed. Even then, they didn’t particularly have good data.”

Peggy had known the US Army had their own supply of Steve’s blood, one they had fairly used up by 1946. What they had done with the data gathered out of those samples, she never knew. “I am guessing the Army tried?”

Betty pursed her lips, her violet eyes hardening perceptible as she nodded. “Oh, yeah, lots of times, none that ever worked out fully, many that had unintended consequences and side effects that ruined lives. Let’s just say that Bruce was one of a long line of such underhanded attempts, and just like all the others, he didn’t turn out to be what they expected him to be.”

Peggy made a mental note to herself to discuss that subject with the scientist later. “What did you find on Steve’s condition?”

“A lot,” Betty flipped the tablet so that Peggy and Cassandra could both see it. “Frankly, I have to say that Abraham Erskine and Howard Stark were both insane and brilliant. Captain Rogers is really the perfect balance of what the serum was supposed to do - creating a human being at the peak of his physical form, who is tough enough and resilient enough to withstand just about anything and survive just about any condition. This is how the serum is supposed to work.”

It went unsaid that it wasn’t supposed to work the way it manifested in Bruce Banner. Certainly, like Steve, Banner in his hulking form could withstand just about anything, certainly more so than Steve, but it came at a terrible price. The strength and endurance of a titan, but the loss of his intellect and everything that made him a rational human. How Erskine did it when so many others failed, Peggy would never know.

Betty tapped on screens, pulling up chemical formulas, ones Peggy recognized from working with Erskine and Howard so long ago. “So you get the basic idea with the serum, that it was meant to change the subjects cells down to their DNA, to encode them to be, essentially, perfect, the best any human cells could get.”

“And also to repair and fix any broken genetic code, yes.” Peggy shrugged, nodding in memory. “Our understanding of DNA was rudimentary, but Erskine did know it was there and used that in his research.”

Betty was clearly impressed, as was Dr. Young nearby. “Good, less for me to explain, then. Part of that rewrite was to create systems that allowed the subject to survive under great stress; advanced metabolism, increased lung capacity and oxygen efficiency, cellular protection against degradation and increased healing factors to keeps his body from breaking down as fast as everyone else, and of course, the one that is key in wartime situations, ways to regulate body temperature and functions in case he is caught in unsafe environments.”

None of this was particularly new information to Peggy, but she nodded in understanding all the same. “The latter I know, I had to sit up with him on many a late watch on a cold morning in the mountains, shivering under thermals and my sleeping roll. He acted as if it were merely a mildly chilly day.”

“Had to sit up or chose to sit up with him,” Cassandra beside her whispered, a devilish glitter in her far-too-innocent expression. Peggy chose to ignore her.

Betty, too, smiled, but continued. “Part of that was simply his metabolism, it ran so fast he generated heat. Bruce’s metabolism does too, incidentally. What it also did, which I hadn’t expected and wouldn’t have looked for until Dr. Young stumbled on it, was that it slowed down...far down. His core body temperature dropped, his heart rate slowed, so did his breathing.”

“Basically, he’s in hibernation,” Cassandra posited, an analogy that rang true to Peggy’s understanding of the serum.

“Which all makes sense in terms of keeping his systems running and him alive, but how did he not freeze to death?”

Dr. Young spoke up then. “That was the tricky bit I couldn’t figure out. Dr. Ross was the one who put the pieces together.”

Betty’s grin was somewhat gleeful as she pulled a new screen on her tablet. “He’s basically a water bear!”

Peggy blinked at the unfamiliar term. “A what?”

“A water bear, a tardigrade, a microscopic creature that survives in extreme temperatures.” She had pulled up a picture of a strange, alien looking bug-like creature that looked rather like a fat, rolling wood louse. “Tardigrades, much like Captain Rogers, also are able to lower their metabolism, which means they need less energy, and then repurposing their own body energy stores to protect their cells from crystallizing. This is pretty much what his body is doing. Normally, his liver would burn its glycogen stores to produce glucose to keep him at peak condition - this is why his metabolism goes so fast. Once his metabolism slowed to nearly nothing, the glucose was repurposed, thickening his blood and lowering the freezing temperature of any water in his circulatory system, which prevented crystallization. Consequently, the cells in his body got a continuous, if slow, supply of fluids, which helped to prevent osmotic shrinkage, essentially preserving them.”

Peggy frowned, processing for a long moment. “Essentially, his body created its own antifreeze, preventing his cells from being damaged, all the while he entered a state of hibernation to allow his functions to slow to the most minimum functions needed to support life?”

“Exactly that,” Betty beamed, pulling up the scans of Steve’s body that Dr. Young had showed Peggy before. “This explains why his body has such extensive damage from the crash, it didn’t have time to even heal. Essentially, his body has been using all of its energy just in maintaining the most minimum needed to allow it to keep functioning, while at the same time keeping it from freezing all together. It didn’t have any more energy to fix the breaks, cuts and contusions.”

Cassandra spoke up, curious as she studied Steve’s pod. “How come he hasn’t aged a day, even in the ice?”

“Much the same reason. Just as he can’t grow and repair old cells, his cells aren’t dying either. Essentially, everything came to a standstill, all his body's processes have been put on hold while it all just focuses on staying alive. He is, in effect, in suspended animation.”

It was all so...strange and technical. It made perfect sense logically, and yet she wasn’t sure if she should be happy they had discovered the reason why he survived or not. “So, how do we wake him up?”

Dr. Young had been in charge of Steve’s care for weeks and it was she who took over at a nod from Betty. “Under Dr. Ross’ suggestion, we have planned out a course of action for his eventual waking and recovery. Starting today, we will slowly begin bringing his body temperature up. This will be the most delicate part of the process, because we can’t go too fast, it will shock his system. We will also begin giving him some energy - likely a glucose drip to get sugars and fluids back into his system to kick start his metabolism. Once his body is stabilized enough that it is safe, we can go in and do what surgeries we need for the more serious damage to help set it so his body’s healing factors can do the rest.”

“Once he’s back up to normal levels, all of that should heal itself without any side effects,” Betty provided, more confident than Peggy felt. “We will of course have to work to keep his energy levels up, the minute his metabolism is fully online he will burn through calories fast to try and heal and repair himself, but after that it will just be a matter of his body recovering and his brain wanting to wake up. That is the bit that will take the longest, I’m afraid, and even I can’t predict that.”

Dr. Young looked just as uncertain, but at least hopeful. “Right now, with his metabolism so low, it’s hard to judge how the brain damage he sustained will heal and at rate, let alone what his functionality will be. I have neurology on it, once he’s brought round more they plan to monitor that closely. That is the most delicate part of all of this, and we don’t know how a super soldier will react to that sort of neurological trauma, but we remain hopeful.”

Still, it was progress, far more than Peggy had seen in the last two weeks. “So when do you start?”

Betty looked to Dr. Young. The other woman glanced at Steve’s sleeping form. “We could start now, we are set up for it. We can begin the process of bringing him up from the cryogenic temperatures in the pod, then slowly move him to the point we can remove him.”

“We may want to get him out of his gear, however, that way we can treat him propery.” Betty eyed that critically.

Ignoring the vague images that brought up, Peggy agreed readily. “Save his gear if you can, I want him to have it when he wakes, to have something familiar, at least. God knows, this will be mad enough for him.”

Dr. Young agreed readily. “We will see what we can do. I can also make sure you get regular reports on his condition as it changes.”

“Please do,” Peggy softly requested, studying Steve’s unmoving face under glass. They were so very close...so close.

What would she do when he awoke? Peggy wasn’t sure. So many years of longing for him, of wishing he were there, of hoping he would arrive out of thin air on her doorstep, the very idea of him actually being alive and real and there, able to touch and to hold, still felt impossible. When presented with the reality, it left her feeling overwhelmed and numb, but grateful, so very grateful to both of them.

“The minute there is the slightest change, you’ll tell me?”

“Of course,” both women chorused, clearly aware of just how much this meant to Peggy.

“Right,” she breathed, forcing out a steadying breath, pulling herself together despite the giddy feelings spinning just at the edges of her control. “Let’s proceed.”

And just like that, the room came alive, people swarming the pod and the stations, leaving Peggy once again cut off from the action in the room. She caught Cassandra’s eye, nodding for them both to make their way out of this business. Best not to be underfoot when doctors and medical staff busied themselves.

“Director,” Betty Ross called over the hum of voices, orders, and machines. Peggy paused in step, turning to the scientist, about to remind her of the fact she could call her by her first name.

“Peggy, I know,” Betty grinned, a broad, wide grin, full of delight at the breakthrough they had reached. “I mean, I didn’t want to call you that in front of everyone.”

“I doubt they will notice,” Peggy observed, everyone working busily on Steve and paying no attention to Peggy as she tried to slink out of the room.

“Still...I’m glad you asked me on this project. I mean, I know what I said back home, but...I get that he means a lot to you...more than a lot to you.”

Peggy could only nod, that giddy feeling too close to the surface for her to speak.

“I’ve learned so much about the serum, Erskine’s work, how it was meant to operate...I was wondering if, with your permission, I can continue to study some of my findings.”

It took a long moment for Peggy to realize what she was asking. “Of course! I did assure you that whatever findings you had, they were yours to explore how you wished.”

“I know,” Betty rushed in, waving the hand not holding her tablet. “I meant much more to ask if I could...perhaps continue working on it more officially.”

Peggy tried to piece out what the scientist was stepping around. “SHIELD isn’t reviving the super soldier program.”

“I know, but you are working on something else right? The reason you want Bruce, and Stark, and even Captain Rogers. Erik Selvig told me you are working on a team.”

Peggy only sighed. “Betty, we are up in the air with the Avengers. Right now, I don’t even have the budget for a team. The best I could do is hire you on as a consultant.”

“Which is fine! I mean, I still have my obligations to Culver at the moment, research I am doing, lots of grant work. This would be, at best, a side project, but one that I could be useful with. We know so little about the serum and how it works, it could only be helpful. And besides, if there was a way it could benefit others in a lesser capacity…”

Peggy couldn’t help but wonder if Betty Ross was thinking of Bruce and somehow reverse the effects of the serum on him.

“I’d be happy to have you on board,” she assured the other woman. “And...we will see what the future of the Avengers even is at this point. That said, for everything you are doing for Steve…”

“That is my pleasure,” she cut in, her expression soft as she flushed. “I just am glad to be helping him come back.”

With that, the other woman turned, back to the business around Steve. Peggy watched her, mildly thinking that it was strange to think of her as Thaddeus Ross’ daughter. Bruce Banner was an idiot to run away and hide away from a woman with as big of a heart and good of will as Betty Ross.

“Cassandra,” Peggy turned to the other agent, a thought hitting her. “Where is Agent Romanoff right now?”

Cassandra’s brow creased in thought. “I believe she is on a mission, though I bet I can find out where.”

“If there is nothing pressing with her, do you think you could get her here?”

“Possibly. Why?”

“I’d like a report on Bruce Banner and his whereabouts.”

Now Cssandra was confused. “But she reported a couple of weeks ago. I don’t think it’s changed…”

“Not for me, for Dr. Ross. She’s heard nothing of him since the incident last spring. I think she would like a first hand account.”

Cassandra began to pick up what was going on. “I will check in, see if she’s got any open space she can come in for a minute.”

“And I can fill her in on the latest in all of this.” Peggy had a feeling that the other operative would be less than impressed with the latest angle with the Avengers. “Tell her I will make it worth her while.”

That piqued Cassandra’s interest. “How will you do that?”

“I’m not sure. What does one bribe a Russian assassin with?”

“Not the sort of question I thought I would be asking myself in my day, but I can always see what she wants. I know I’m a sucker for Belgian chocolate and a good pinot, myself.”

Peggy had to admit, that likely would buy her loyalty as well. “Tell her I’ll give her that and a week wherever she chooses if she gets here in the next seven days.”

“You are serious.”

Peggy thought of the missing and mysterious Scott Lang and the uncertainty of their future. “I suppose I am tired of waiting for things to happen to me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Betty here is referring to the case of Isaiah Bradley from the comic books - a very sad situation and unfortunately not uncommon or unheard of. I have a strong suspicion that "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" is going to cover some of that ground in the show (hence why I am so vague) and I'm interested to see what they do with it.


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Natasha Romanoff has some questions.

Trust Darcy Lewis to cut to the heart of the matter.

“So, aliens are a thing and there are a lot of them.”

That wasn’t precisely the report that Peggy was looking for from Jane Foster and her intern.

“I believe we were already well aware of that, given our encounter with Thor last spring.” Peggy's acerbity was high this morning and she projected it through the video connection at the two women who huddled together in front of Foster’s laptop. “Do you have anything more than that?”

“Definitive? No.” Foster had been at the SWORD facility now for a fortnight, which made her admission rather disheartening. “There are those who might know something out there, but unfortunately it’s not unlike gathering intelligence on Earth. You have to keep your ear to the ground and hope you run across a hint of information somewhere, that someone knows something and they are willing to share it with you. Difference is that space is a lot - well - bigger. We are talking about trillions of possibilities here, but I am assured that there is a list of prime suspects for something of the magnitude you are discussing. I’m not an operative nor an astronaut, but SWORD has people out there on it.”

If you had told Peggy in 1948 that two years later she would be having a conversation about intelligence gathering from extraterrestrial beings right now, she might have told you to go home and sober up. But, here she was, having that conversation with Foster and feeling frustrated with the lack of information. Given that they were discussing space, and that she had only an inkling of the concept of its size, she should be far more patient about this, but Peggy had a feeling time wasn’t precisely on their side.

“Any word on the Asgardians?” That was at least a known quantity. It had been six months since they had heard anything from Thor, a man who had sworn to protect the Earth. For a man who seemed so keen on making oaths, he had spent precious little of it doing anything about it.

To her credit, Foster hid her pained expression well. “I’ve had SWORD reach out through some channels who know the Asgardians well. From what we’ve been able to piece together, Thor went back to Asgard and found an attempted coup on his hands. What exactly happened isn’t clear, but their main generator for creating the Einstein-Rosen bridge was destroyed in some sort of accident. They currently are rebuilding it, but that means they are stranded for the moment till they do, which is likely why we haven’t seen Thor.”

“He’s got a legitimate excuse for ditching us and Jane is what she is saying,” Darcy supplied, ignoring Foster’s pointed glare. “What she isn’t saying is that I guess the Asgardians are some sort of colonial peace force for huge parts of the galaxy or something. With them stuck, that means things are going a big crazy out there. Even if he gets off the planet any time soon, he may have to go play clean up duty elsewhere, places that took advantage of the sheriff being stranded.”

The interstellar political and security situation was a bit beyond Peggy’s understanding - in principle she got it, but without clear reference points she had no idea if this was a massive problem for them or not. “Is there a way we can reach out to him or any of the Asgardians to seek their assistance in this matter?”

“We are on it,” Foster assured her. “There is no guarantee they will answer. From what I understand, Earth is seen as sort of this backwater, forgotten hole in the back of the universe, most civilizations out there don’t even know we exist and if they do they don’t care. I don’t know of the Asgardians outside of Thor know of us and if they will even be willing to help.”

“Thor swore he would. Perhaps, if we can get to him, they might. He is a prince after all.”

“So he said,” Foster drawled. Thor was a sore subject for the astrophysicist, Peggy knew, but in times like these she wasn’t inclined to stand on tender feelings. “Anyway, that’s what we got for the moment. Seriously, why SHIELD and SWORD don’t work more often together is a mystery to me. They are two halves of the same idea.”

“You know, you would think they would...sword, shield, sort of goes together, like a knight,” Darcy waxed, philosophically.

Unable to help herself, Peggy looked towards Steve’s shield, newly refurbished, now encased in a protective covering. It sat there, like a reminder of why she founded SHIELD and what it was meant to do. “I am sure there was a logistics reason as to why, likely having to do with politics and money. In my experience founding SHIELD, that was usually why such decisions were made. Not a good reason, but a common one.”

“This is why we can’t let the politicians have nice things,” Darcy nodded, knowingly. She would understand, given her background in political science. Perhaps that was why in the end she decided to pursue astrophysics instead, less of the drama and egos of politics to have to deal with - well, in theory at least. Peggy was sure she would find out different once she got into academia.

Foster used that point to segue neatly into her next question. “Speaking of budgets and politics, how is the standoff with SHIELD regarding the Avengers Initiative?”

“Still at a stalemate till we get more information. I believe that Alexander Pierce has at least convinced the World Security Council to go along with my plan to hire the likes of Tony Stark as consultants in the interest of keeping him and his suit under SHIELD’s purview. Bruce Banner and his status remain...sticky.” 

From her conversation with Pierce just days ago, it was clear little progress had been made on that front. On a level, Peggy couldn’t blame the council, Banner was a wild card at best. Still, it was better to have those wild cards working with SHIELD than out and about, unsupervised. That was the argument she hoped would prevail with the rest. Malick, unsurprisingly, was turning out to be obdurately stubborn on the matter.

Foster clearly expected this. “So we keep on as we are now?”

“For now,” Peggy replied, hoping privately that Fury came through with funds enough to make this all work. She had yet to speak to the current director of SHIELD. Pierce had indicated Fury had been splitting his time between two other projects of high importance and had felt confident in leaving this situation in Peggy’s hands. Peggy was of the opinion that Fury perhaps should be focusing on the Avengers more than he was, but seeing as she was being purposely left out of the loop, she couldn't speak to the importance of what he was up to.

It wasn’t precisely the first time she had been left out of the loop by men in authority somewhere, she mused, darkly.

“Speaking of moving on,” Darcy brought up with surprising seriousness. “How is Captain America doing?”

“Better...slowly. Thank you for asking. He’s been brought out of his cryogenic state and the medical team has addressed his many injuries from the crash and now it is a case of monitoring and waiting to see how he progresses. As Dr. Young tells me, baby steps.” Peggy slipped on what she thought was a positive smile, despite the fact it felt plastered on, stretched and brittle. “Now his recovery really begins.”

While Darcy nodded, unwontedly sober for the normally sarcastic girl, Foster gave Peggy a look of reassurance. “I know he’s a super soldier, he will get through this okay. And he’ll have a whole new world to get to know!”

“Yeah, wait till he hears popular music now at days,” Darcy offered, with a dryly cheerful deadpan that really did make Peggy chuckle.

“Considering I’m no better off than he, I believe we can complain about the good old days together. Anyway, check in with me in a week and if you hear something sooner, you let me know.”

“Will do!” With that, Foster and her intern logged off. Peggy stared at her computer screen, blankly, mulling over Foster’s report. A whole universe of people out there, races she couldn’t even imagine, and Earth - their home - was but a tiny speck in all of it, so insignificant that they couldn’t be bothered. That felt so...demoralizing wasn’t the world, but it shifted perspective somewhat. She considered the events of history just within her lifetime, or even shortly before. Her father and uncle had fought alongside millions, many of whom died horrible, ignominious deaths, with the detritus of that war still being found in back gardens all over parts of France. The next war had been even worse, truly spanning the entire world, even more so than the previous one. In the near 100 years since the first World War to now, it felt as if humanity had thrown itself against the brink time and time again, just barely managing not to destroy itself utterly in the process, between bombs and diseases, military engagements and terrorism. Humanity could have reduced itself to cinders and the universe would have never even known or cared.

That was a sobering thought.

“Either you’ve had bad news or the world is going to end - so, which is it?”

Peggy blinked up at Natasha Romanoff’s wry observation, surprised to see the petite redhead standing in her doorway. “You made it in. Cassandra hadn’t mentioned it.”

“Just landed, headed over, as requested.” Romanoff pushed off the door, wandering to sit in front of Peggy’s desk, slumping into the chair in a way the graceful woman usually didn’t have. Either she was that exhausted or she wanted to appear that way. It was hard telling what angle Natasha was ever playing.

“How was your latest assignment?”

“Routine, but thanks for asking.” As a regular operative, and the highest level one at that, Romanoff usually was assigned to one of the STRIKE teams along with her partner, Clint Barton. That said, she also was frequently deployed on missions on her own at the request of Fury and Coulson. Much like many things in Fury’s purview, those missions often weren't made privy to Peggy. Considering the weary circles just visible under Romanoff’s green eyes and the way she sagged in her seat, Peggy guessed whatever she had been up to hadn’t been either smooth or easy, thus casting some doubt on her “routine” answer. Still, as a former operative herself, Peggy knew better than to press.

“I’m glad you made it in safely enough.” That much was true. Despite the prickly relationship she often had with Romanoff, she did appreciate the woman, perhaps admired her, even. She had known another woman like her before, perhaps had known many others like Romanoff. She was, after all, a survivor, and one didn’t have to look too deeply into the woman’s past to see that. Given what little Peggy knew of her past - and it was precious little - it wasn’t a surprise to her that Romanoff was sitting there despite looking as if she had just walked from the middle of nowhere to get there.

“When I got the call, I booked it here. Sorry that it took me a minute to get the call, Kam’s message got to me a week ago.”

“I knew you were in the field. I thought you would make it in as soon as you could.”

Romanoff lifted one shoulder under her red leather jacket. “I heard that there were bribes involved. I take payment in chocolate, massages, and fine Italian coffee.”

That did make Peggy smile. “All of which can be arranged, as can time off. You look as if you need it and I’m not above putting in a call for you.”

“I may take you up on it, soon. I’m in the middle of...a thing.”

One didn’t need to be a mind reader to pick up on that. Romanoff had spent two years all together out of the game. The year before Peggy’s appearance in this world, she had been wounded in the field, nearly getting killed by an assassin’s bullet meant for someone else. No sooner was she back then she was put on Tony’s Stark’s detail, spending much of that time undercover at Stark Industries. She clearly was relishing real field work once again. Frankly, Peggy couldn’t blame her, there was a part of her - a large part of her - that missed that work herself.

“Saw Sharon in Europe on my way over,” Natasha segued, lazily, quickly shifting topics away from what she may or may not have been up to on her mission. “She says hi.”

“Hopefully she’s staying safe enough.”

“Oh, you know, a chip off the old Carter block.”

That could go either way, Peggy realized, and wondered privately if that was why Natasha phrased it the way she did.

The perfunctory knock on her door broke through their conversation, Betty Ross peeking quizzically in. “Agent Kam said you would likely want me to come up.”

“Yes,” Peggy waved her in, indicating towards Romanoff as she did. “Dr. Ross, this is Agent Natasha Romanoff. Agent Romanoff, Dr. Elizabeth Ross. She is heading up our research on Dr. Erskine’s serum.”

That made Betty blush. “Trying to, at least.” She took Romanoff’s outstretched hand. “A pleasure.”

“Likewise,” Romanoff assured her, graciously. In an instant she seemed to change from exhausted to poised and polite, as if by magic, pulling herself together in front of someone new.

“I brought Agent Romanoff in as she is the agent who is assigned on the detail for Dr. Banner.”

One would have to be blind not to see the spark that Peggy’s words created in the scientist. Though she schooled her features passively, her violet eyes lit up, ever so briefly, flickering curiously and eagerly towards Romanoff. “You know where he is?”

To Romanoff’s credit, she glanced at Peggy ever so briefly, waiting for her nod, before pulling up a reassuring smile. “He’s fine. He’s been staying in and around Mumbai for the most part, keeping a low profile.”

“India?” Betty hadn't even known that much, and she was surprised he was so far away. “I mean...I assumed that maybe he was still in North America! I got a letter…”

Her fingers trailed upwards to a pendant around her neck, a charm somehow tied to Banner, Peggy surmised.

“Our intelligence had him leaving several weeks ago,” Romanoff clarified, smoothly. “Since then he’s set himself up on the outskirts of town. He’s been using his medical skills there, partly in trade for necessities, but also to do good humanitarian work. It seems to keep him…grounded.”

The subtext of Romanoff’s words was clear. Whatever Banner was up to, it at least meant that the other part of his personality was clearly dormant for the moment.

Peggy jumped in with a tone that she hoped was reassuring. “We have made sure that we have sent supplies through various channels for him to easily get for his treatments. Enough he can get what he needs without worrying he’s being trailed by SHIELD.”

Betty’s gaze narrowed somewhat at Peggy’s words. “And is he? Being trailed by SHIELD?”

“Yes,” Peggy met her disapproval evenly. “Whether we like it or not, Dr. Banner can be dangerous and we don’t know when or how he is provoked. Should something happen, thousands could be at risk, whether Dr. Banner means to hurt them or not.”

Betty looked ready to protest, but clearly thought better of it. She shifted tactics. “He’s able to live his life, though, right?”

“SHIELD hasn’t interfered,” Romanoff assured her. “I’ve monitored and kept my distance.”

“Is he aware that you are watching him?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

Whether or not she was happy about the situation, Betty seemed resigned to it. “All right, he safe and well. So when do we work on bringing him home?”

That was the tricky question, wasn’t it?

Romanoff immediately looked to Peggy, as did Betty, the former with curiosity, the latter with expectation. Peggy sighed. This would be tricky at best.

“For now, at least until the situation warrants it, we haven’t made plans to return Dr. Banner to the United States.”

Peggy knew it would cause a mutiny on the part of Betty, and for her part was sorry for it. Unsurprisingly, the other woman’s eyes flashed as her expression flickered between Peggy and Romanoff. “Why not?”

“Because he’s a danger to any and all major metropolitan areas if he goes off,” Romanoff replied, not unkindly, but rather matter-of-fact.

That wasn’t what Betty wanted to hear. “You all brought me on…”

“To work on the serum,” Peggy saw the attack that Betty was bringing to bear and cut it off. “And we still are. You asked if you could stay to work on. I know why you want to, that you want to help him, and I support that. But Romanoff has a point, right now he’s too dangerous to bring back and hope we can control him.”

“But it’s all right to leave him in India, in a major metropolitan area, and allow him to rampage there, right?”

She had a point, one Peggy didn’t like to admit made her feel uncomfortable, but Romanoff was already on it. “We have our SHIELD offices in India already setting up contingency plans should the worst happen. Besides, Dr. Banner seems to be fully aware that he could be set off. He purposely tends to stay well away from the most populated areas unless he’s treating patients.”

That hardly mollified Betty, but it did take the edge off her frustration somewhat. “The US is full of wide open spaces where there aren’t many people. I know there are places there he could be kept, old, abandoned bunkers and silos that have been decommissioned. Any one of those could be used if he has an outbreak.”

“I don’t disagree,” Peggy offered, reasonably. “And if it were up to me, I’d happily have him in one.”

“So what, the World Security Council would rather have him ostracized and in hiding?”

“The World Security Council would rather have him chained up and sedated in an enclosed facility, unable to escape,” Peggy replied, flatly, with all the gravity she could muster. Betty was angry, justifiably so. She had lost so much the moment Bruce Banner had foolishly taken his own serum. But the politics of Banner’s existence, and the ethics of it as well, were far more complicated than just simply bringing him home.

It got through, clearly, as the other woman paused, her mouth open as if stopped in the middle of an argument, only to think better of it. She closed her mouth with a snap, mutinous, but thoughtful at least.

“Couldn’t we at least...I don’t know, reach out to Bruce?” There was a tinge of desperation in Betty’s voice. “Give him the choice on whether he wants to come home or not?”

It was Romanoff who took the lead here. “With all due respect, Dr. Ross, Banner has made his choice. He chose to go to India. It’s not ideal, no, but it’s somewhere where he can hide, where he can get away if he needs, and where he can do a lot of good and not be totally isolated. He made his choice already, and frankly, until we need him for something else, I feel we should respect that choice.”

Romanoff’s words were kindly spoken and just as kindly meant, but they stirred Betty, who rose, storming to the windows of Peggy’s office, her back angrily to them both as she stared out towards the theaters and buildings that lined 46th Street. Romanoff glanced towards Peggy, uncertain, as Peggy quietly shrugged, giving the other woman her space. It was only after several moments of silence that Betty spoke again.

“I told him not to take that serum, not to do those experiments.” She finally turned back towards them, tears streaming down her pale cheeks. She wiped at them absently. “The General was pressuring us for results and Bruce wanted to...wanted to impress him, I guess, or make him happy, prove to him that he was a worthy son-in-law, I guess. It was stupid, unethical, and completely dangerous, and this is why. And now he’s choosing to hide away, cutting me off...again...because it’s for my own protection? You know, my father did the same shit, treating me like I was a little girl, a fragile doll, not telling me anything till it all exploded in our faces and ruined our lives - anytime we had to move because of the army, my mother’s illness, what happened to Bruce. And I’m...just so tired of this. They both act as if this is only all about them, as if I’m not invested in this too.”

Her outburst was unexpected and yet so poignant. Peggy’s heart ached with her words. Hadn’t she felt that pain herself several times over, from various quarters over the years. How high-handed had so many acted in her life, choosing to cut her out either because of her gender, or their worries over her sensibilities, or out of fears for her own safety. So many she could have choked on it. No matter how many things had changed from that time till now, that seemed to remain constant.

Across from Peggy, a hint of compassion flickered across Romanoff’s otherwise placid features. “I’m sorry, Dr. Ross, that you’ve had to go through this. I will make sure to keep you regularly updated on his movements and how he’s doing.”

What else could they say on that? Betty nodded, rubbing at her cheeks, pulling together some of her dignity. “Yeah, thank you, Agent Romanoff. If there isn’t anything else, I need to go check on Captain Rogers.”

Peggy winced as she said that, frowning as the other woman turned without a by-your-leave, her steps quick out of the door. Both she and Romanoff watched for several long seconds before either of them spoke.

“I wouldn’t have said what I did if I didn’t think it were true,” Romanoff murmured, softly.

“I know,” Peggy replied, guilt and sadness for Betty’s situation mingling uncomfortably. “And I don’t think you are wrong. Clearly, Banner is fearful and wants to keep people safe, Betty Ross included.”

“Doesn’t mean it isn’t painful.”

Peggy sighed. “That I know all too well.”

Romanoff watched her with her guardedly thoughtful expression, one she often wore around Peggy. “So Rogers...is he going to be up soon?”

“Sooner rather than later,” Peggy confirmed, a thrill of mingled anticipation and terror running through her at the idea. “He’s still healing, but...yes, we will see how that goes.”

“Will he back to his old self again?”

“Maybe,” Peggy hedged, knowing the long road he still had in his recovery, the many injuries he had sustained and the time it took to heal from that, even for him and his enhanced body.

Romanoff had that thoughtful look again. “Was it like that for you, then, after he crashed into that glacier?”

Her question took Peggy aback, startled and hurt, until she understood what Romanoff was asking and the connection she was making to Betty Ross and Bruce Banner.

“Yes...sometimes.” She admitted that, carefully, perhaps even a bit shamefully. She had been completely aware of why Steve had done it, why he had given his life that day, crashing the _Valkyrie_ into the ice off the Canadian coast, saving so many. But logic didn’t sooth the crushing weight of her broken heart, the grief and the aching loss of hopes and dreams slipping through her fingers as the static crackled over the radio lines for seconds, minutes, hours, without a response. She had felt anger that day, at Steve, at fate, at the Nazis and HYDRA and the whole damned war for taking so much from her and then taking this one last thing as well. She had been lucky compared to many, she knew that. How many had lost so much more than she had, faced so many worse and more horrific things than she had? It hadn’t been rational, she knew that, but she supposed that emotions often didn’t work like that.

Romanoff was quiet again as Peggy’s mind ran through it’s complex dance of feeling and thought. It made Peggy consider what little she knew about the woman and her own life, wonder if she had ever been in that position at all? Had anyone ever even tried to protect her, or had Romanoff always been left on her own? Did she have anyone before Clint Barton that she ever cared enough about that it hurt to lose them? Did the Red Room even give her that much.

“I know it’s hard for Dr. Ross,” Romanoff spoke, finally, considering. “And I know it’s not what she wants, but I think he’s coming from a good place. Banner isn’t a horrible man.”

“He’s not,” Peggy agreed. She hadn’t met him, really, not the real him, at least, but she did know something of him. He wouldn’t have tried so hard to protect people if he was a monster.

“I am guessing Rogers is much the same way, then,” Romanoff queried, thoughtful as she leaned back in her chair again, her poise faltering as she assumed something more comfortable. “The good qualities outweigh the bad?”

This was an interesting topic they had somehow wandered into, Peggy thought, as she nodded, unable to hide the smile that seemed to pull up her mouth as she thought of Steve and who he was. “I’m not fool enough to say Steve doesn’t have his bad qualities, he does. He’s too stubborn by half, sometimes dangerously so. He thinks nothing of throwing himself in dangerous situations to save those he cares for, whoever they are. He has a streak of righteous indignation a mile wide, and when he feels something is morally wrong he will dig his heels in and no amount of reason will talk him out of it.”

That made Romanoff chuckle, softly. “I imagine for someone who had to move in the shadows and operate in gray areas just to get things done, that had to be difficult between you.”

Peggy tried to remember if it ever was. “Perhaps, sometimes. In truth, so much of what I did was classified, I don’t think it came up. By the time I was working with the Howling Commandos full time, it was different.”

“And what about someone who unambiguously is that way?”

Peggy finally saw just where Romanoff had been leading to. “You are worried about whether or not he will be willing to work with someone like you?”

“Got to admit, it’s a valid concern if we are going to be doing this Avenger thing together.”

“If the Avengers get off the ground, that is,” Peggy replied.

That didn’t dissuade Romanoff. “Let’s say that it does. Stark already doesn’t like me and I don’t think he will ever totally trust me. He hates liars, and that is what I do. If Rogers is as tried and true as the stories say he is, it puts me at a disadvantage from the start.”

“Steve isn’t like that,” Peggy tried to reassure her, but Romanoff only shrugged, absently, clearly not certain.

“Are you sure? Just like you, he missed out on a lot, and he won’t understand the world we live in now, the things that happen, the lengths people are willing to go for their agenda.”

Unspoken was the ugly truth that Romanoff of all people did understand, the lengths that governments and people would go to. She was a byproduct of that. “He doesn’t, no, but then again as you said, I didn’t either, and I’ve learned. Whatever you have done, that isn’t who you are now.”

The other woman’s green eyes narrowed, just a fraction, something calculating passing there. “Are you so certain of that? You don’t know what I’ve been up to and what I’ve been asked to do of late. I’m not just working missions for you.”

“No,” Peggy admitted, wondering if there would ever be a moment when Romanoff would finally let her guard down enough around Peggy for her to ever truly understand her. “But I can’t imagine you wouldn’t ask to be on the Avengers without wanting desperately to do something good. And frankly, that speaks volumes. I think that at the end of the day Steve will see that too.”

“Will he?” Her question was candidly frank, but also far from certain on Peggy’s optimism. “I find it’s pretty easy to put a dead man - or a man everyone thought was dead - up on a pedestal, to turn him into a myth and legend. Coulson can wax poetic about him forever. Sometimes, when you meet the real person, you find that far from being made of marble, they are made of clay, just like everyone else.”

She wasn’t wrong. Still, for all of Coulson’s hero worship, he hadn’t known Steve as a living, breathing person. Peggy had.

“He isn’t a paragon,” Peggy qualified. Frankly, Steve would be horrified at the thought that he was. “He made mistakes, the same as any of us did. But I will say one thing about him is true - he is and always has been a survivor.”

She could see that word resonate powerfully with the other woman, who herself had come through so much to even get to this point in her life.

“When Steve Rogers came through Camp Lehigh, the minute I saw his medical chart, I should have sent him right back home on the bus he came in on. He had enough conditions that any one of them would have disqualified him, but there he was, getting his physical done, defying me to say anything about it. One of his long list of past conditions included rheumatic fever, a condition I don’t know if you see as much in the present. In the 1930s, before modern vaccines and treatments, it wasn’t unheard of. It should have killed him. From what Barnes told me, it nearly did, but he survived. So many things knocked him down - poverty, his health, bullies, doubters - and he kept on going. Sometimes, the only direction I think he knows how to move in is forward, even when life kicked him in the teeth.”

_You don’t think I can make it, do you?_

“I don’t know,” she sighed, meeting Romanoff’s still expression. “That is something I think you of all people would understand. It takes a lot when you have had everything taken from you to pull yourself off the ground and believe that you can keep moving forward. All that is to say that I think that you will find, Natasha, that you and Steve will have more in common than you think. Perhaps the real issue isn’t so much that Steve will take exception to you, but that perhaps you don’t think high enough of yourself. I can’t sit here and pretend I understand what you have gone through or even what you have done in your past. But I have found that in my relatively short and limited experience that a person is made up of many things. I like to think you aren’t simply defined by the sins of your past. You came here, you are trying to do something good, to be something better, and I think that counts for something. Perhaps you can be defined by that as well.”

For long moments Romanoff sat, impassive, but Peggy knew she was thinking, calculating, considering. The woman gave little away, but Peggy hoped her words sunk in and perhaps assured her that her worries were not as dire as she feared them to be.

“Perhaps,” she finally drawled, slowly, pulling herself forward in the chair. “We will have to see when I get to meet him.”

She rose at that, plastering on a polite smile over her exhaustion. “I’ve got a hotel for the night before I’m heading to DC and my place tomorrow. If there is a basket waiting with chocolate, espresso, and a gift card to a masseuse, I will say thank you now and enjoy each and every one of those.”

“You’re welcome,” Peggy replied, making a mental note to have JARVIS arrange for those very things to be sent and waiting for her when she returned home tomorrow. She watched the other woman leave, hoping that if she hadn’t cracked through her impenetrable armor, she had at least made enough of a chink that she could give Steve understanding and trust. Perhaps eventually, she and Romanoff could do the same.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you have seen it...that _WandaVision_ finale. I had some feels. All of them, to be precise.


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Tony swoops in with an idea.

Steve’s prognosis improved, slowly...far too slowly for Peggy’s liking. In truth, considering the damage he sustained and the fact that he had been frozen for decades, his progress was mind boggling fast. Any other patient who had survived massive trauma would be healing weeks more, even months more, and then would spend another long period of recovery and rehabilitation, performing physical therapy just to be able to do basic things once again. Steve’s body had come through surgery without even a problem. Over the course of the next three weeks, the team kept his healing slow, but constant, in order to ensure even regeneration and to prevent taxing his still rousing metabolic system. By all outward appearances, he looked as if he would make it out of a life-ending plane crash and hypothermia without nary a scratch on him.

It wasn’t the outward appearances that had them concerned however, it was the inward ones.

Peggy had been warned by Betty, Dr. Young, and the neurologists on the team that the delicate process of his brain healing was the one aspect of this that none of them could be sure of. Brain injuries in normal people were dangerous and unpredictable at best. Peggy had seen it for herself, a soldier could be knocked out cold for days and come back as if nothing ever happened, but another could have a glancing blow and die hours later of a cerebral hemorrhage no one would have ever expected. Steve had been thrown, head first, through the giant, plate-glass windshield of the Valkyrie and landed in the avalanche of snow and ice that it had plowed into. What damage that did, she couldn’t say, neither could the experts. For now, it was a game of waiting to see how his body would heal and when he would wake up.

And so, she waited.

Once they reached the recovery phase, the team discussed how to best approach it. The lead SHIELD psychologist who Dr. Young had consulted with had suggested creating an environment that would be analogous to and reminiscent of the type one would find in a New York hospital in the 1940s, something that would be comforting and easy for his brain to process when he awoke. Peggy had nixed that idea immediately, unwilling to trick or lie to Steve about what had happened to him. Besides, seventy years on, she doubted that SHIELD would be able to fully recreate the 1940s in such a way Steve wouldn’t pick up on differences. He had keen observation and a strategist's mind, he’d pick out a falsehood in a heartbeat. Ultimately, she suggested they simply put him in a quiet, comfortable space, where he could be monitored but without the hordes of glaring lights and beeping machines to disorient him. Perhaps a bit of sunlight wouldn’t hurt, what little there was to be found in New York in the winter. And so they found a room on the ground level they quickly turned into a recovery room, with a comfortable medical bed and a bit of light to encourage him to open his eyes.

In the end, that was all she wanted, was for him to just open his eyes.

With this change, Peggy’s days shifted as well, blurring and melting into a continuum as she took to spending more and more time close to Steve’s side. The room that had been assigned by Chief Braxton, the head of the New York office, was small and tucked away, well off the beaten path of most SHIELD agents who went about their business, but easily observable by security if need be. Peggy found it easy to slip in there most mornings to see him, spend time by his bedside before duties called her away, only to return in the evening to sit with him further. It became her ritual, spending her non-working, waking hours with him, pulling in a nearby, unused office chair beside his bed, busying herself with work or a book, as Steve continued to sleep on, blissfully unaware.

She shouldn’t have been surprised when four days later, a rather comfortable and squashy chair appeared in the corner, something far more easy to curl up in. Peggy didn’t know if it were Betty or Dr. Young who ordered it, perhaps even Braxton, but she was grateful. She would set herself up there of an evening, amusing herself with finding old movies she knew he enjoyed and old radio shows that would have been on when he was young, ones she had never heard living on her side of the Atlantic. The nostalgia for the world she had once know, the life she had once lived, hit her in those moments, the memories of life before cellular phones in every pocket, and twenty-four hour television and streaming media on the internet came to dominate everyone’s lives. It felt so much...simpler. And yet, it was familiar too, the way the media itself worked, the stories it told, even the product placement. Somehow, none of that changed in the decades since. She wondered, idly, what Steve would make of all this.

It was Phil Coulson who made the suggestion regarding the baseball games. Peggy hadn’t even considered it, sports in general, and American baseball in particular, not being something she made overt attention to. He had connected with her on Steve’s progress, eager to hear how his hero was doing and what he could do to help acclimate him into the world. Hearing how Peggy had taken to spending her evenings, he eagerly sent her to a website that streamed old radio broadcasts of games, something that struck Peggy as somehow quintessentially Coulson. She recalled he rather loved the game himself, had even thought about going into coaching on a high school level before SHIELD had managed to snap him up. She found the old Brooklyn Dodger games from decades ago, ones she was certain Steve had probably recalled from when he had been young, living in Brooklyn with Bucky Barnes. In her mind’s eye she could imagine the pair, listening companionably, comparing notes as each of the different batters came up to bat - that much of the game she had figured out on her own - complaining loudly at various different calls or failed attempts to connect. The game itself wasn’t so difficult she couldn’t follow along, even if she understood it little and the lingo around it even less. That said, it was strangely comforting to have it on in the background as Steve lay there, quiescent, the announcer Red Barber’s patter droning as Peggy listened, imagining what it would be like to actually sit at a baseball game with Steve and have him explain to her how this silly game worked in the first place.

She also knew he would be heartbroken when he found out his beloved Dodgers had long ago moved to Los Angeles and were no longer in Brooklyn. 

And so her days went. One week turned into two, then three. January blew into February. The deep and dingy snows of winter began melting into gray skies and cold mists, rain slicking the streets of New York. And still Peggy waited.

For once, she woke up in her own bed, eyes opening to the silver fog just outside of her window, frowning in the faint sunlight. On instinct, her gaze flickered to the nightstand and the digital alarm clock there, sitting as it was beside the photograph of Steve she kept there. It read 7:30 am, an hour after she intended to wake.

“Mr. Jarvis,” she called, rather sleepily, her voice cracked and congested as it broke on the AI’s name. “Why didn’t my alarm go off?”

As pleasantly polite and obsequious as his human counterpart, JARVIS responded with the usual candor. “I don’t believe you set it before you went to sleep last night. You did return from SHIELD headquarters rather late, I imagine it was easy to forget.”

In other words she had been too tired to remember when she had fallen into her brief and dreamless sleep the night before. She groaned, rubbing at gritty eyes, pushing back her warm duvet to stumble, gracelessly, out of her bed and wander to her bathroom in the dim light. Her sleep-fogged brain tried to remember at what time she had wandered home the night before. Well after midnight, that much she remembered. She had stayed far later than security would have liked her to, she knew, just for safety alone, but she had hoped - wished, perhaps - that if she stayed long enough, maybe, just maybe, by her sheer will and perseverance, she could get Steve to wake. It was silly, she knew, but the vague hope had been there all the same. Dr. Young had told her that every MRI and brain function test they did showed that he seemed to be waking up, becoming more of himself, more aware of the outside world around him bit by bit. If he awoke, it should be any day now.

She hoped it was any day now, at least. After so many years, she needed it to be soon.

Yawning, she went about her morning rituals as always, showering, grooming and dressing with long familiar and automatic ease, with a sort of half-aware attention that spoke to how habitual things like styling her hair and lining her eyes had become. It was, if she admitted it to herself, her sort of armor, the face she made up and put out to the world everyday. She supposed it always had been, even in her younger days. She couldn’t remember many when she hadn’t put out the effort. Despite that, however, even she could see the purple circles under her dark brown eyes, dimmed but not totally hidden under her concealer. Everything about her looked tired.

She had faced a war, once, she could manage this...she hoped.

“Mr. Jarvis,” she called as she padded to her jewelry case, searching for pieces to wear for the day. “What does my morning look like today and how flexible is it?”

JARVIS had not been the default AI for the apartment that Peggy occupied, one of many in a building that SHIELD owned and used for its own personnel. He had been installed as a gift by Tony Stark, a familiar companion to her, an echo of the friend she had once had in JARVIS’ namesake and the basis of his character, Edwin Jarvis. It was the sort of bittersweet gift that touched Peggy’s heart, proving that Howard’s son was more than capable of generosity and a touch of empathy when he so chose. The AI’s presence over the months since his instillation had been one of the comforting joys of Peggy’s life as she tried to hold on to everything else.

“Looking at your calendar, you are scheduled for an 11:00 meeting with Director Fury, who wished to discuss the Avengers situation with you.”

“Ahh, yes, that,” she grumbled, clipping on earrings and searching for a necklace to wear with her simple, cream-colored button down. “What else?”

“You have a 9:30 am call with Dr. Foster and SWORD regarding recent updates on intelligence findings, a 10:30 with the mayor’s emergency team, and then you are free till 2 pm, when Chief Braxton wished to discuss SHIELD resources and responses to the threat assessment report you filed.”

A day of meetings. Peggy already felt exhausted. “I will most likely be late for Jane Foster. Please see if we can move her to later in the afternoon, if possible.”

“You may want to move your meeting with the mayor’s office as well,” JARVIS cautioned, with what Peggy suspected was a hint of apology in his synthesized voice. She frowned, clasping a watch onto her wrist.

“Whatever for?”

There was a pause, almost as if the AI was sighing, trying to figure out what to say. “I feel I’m obligated to tell you that there is a visitor who is checking in downstairs, here to see you...unexpectedly and without an appointment, of course.”

Peggy frowned, thinking of who could possibly be visiting her unannounced that JARVIS would be aware of enough to warn her. The answer was obvious and instantaneous. “What does Mr. Stark want?”

“I would say under normal circumstances it would be a social call, but I believe he is worried and is coming to check in on you.”

“Worried? About what?”

“Mr. Stark does ask rather regularly how you are doing and if you are well.”

JARVIS lacked an actual corporal body for her to glare at, so she glared at the ceiling, shooting it a look of betrayal. “Mr. Jarvis, have you been spying on me?”

“Not spying, per se, but I do keep a monitor on your sleep cycles, eating habits, and daily schedule to ensure your personal health and well being.”

“And reporting it to Mr. Stark?”

“My protocols do, unfortunately, mean that his commands usually supersede all others, yes.”

“For the love of...so he’s been spying on me?”

JARVIS prevaricated for a brief moment. “I believe that is perhaps the most accurate and correct assessment, yes.”

“Bloody hell,” she swore, rolling her eyes as she looked for her favorite comfortable black and white pumps, pulling a blazer from out of her closet and attempting to prepare herself as much as she could before Hurricane Stark wandered through her front door.

“I do believe the elevator will be opening soon,” JARVIS warned her as she finally made her way from her room and down the hall, towards the massive living area and the front door beyond. No sooner had she reached it than the doorbell rang and she yanked the door open. Tony Stark stood on the other side, dressed to the nines in a designer suit, loosely buttoned, hands shoved into his pockets, smirking under his trademark sunglasses as she frowned at him.

“Aunt Peggy! Long time, no see!”

“Anthony! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

As expected, he winced at his given first name. “Can’t a guy just come and see one of his father’s best friends and make sure she’s alive?”

“A guy could call and check to see if I was alive.”

“I did, a few times actually. Always got JARVIS, so didn’t bother to leave a message.”

She rolled her eyes. “Then you can’t blame me if I don’t return your calls.”

“I was more surprised you were so busy given that the Avengers were cancelled.”

“They aren’t cancelled and why are we discussing this on my doorstep?”

“Good point,” he shrugged, taking off his sunglasses and tucking them in his pocket. “Or more appropriately, it is the point. What are you up to this morning?”

She frowned, unsure of where this was leading. “Meetings...work...why?”

“Do you like Daniel Boulud’s cuisine?”

Peggy blinked, having no idea who that even was. “I...don’t know.”

“Pepper’s a big fan. He’s good, don’t get me wrong, but she gets into things like the nuance of flavor and textures, which is good. I love that about her, but sometimes I just want a chocolate croissant. All that to say, there is this really good bakery a couple of blocks from here he owns, thought we could check it out. You do like croissants, right?”

“Errr...yes.” She tried to follow the threads of that explanation. “I mean, yes, I’ve had them and I like them. What is it you are getting at?”

“Breakfast!” He stared at her as if it were obvious. “Best meal of the day! Do it all as the French do, a bit of a light pastry, a bit of a good coffee, enjoying the sunshine…”

“It’s gray and threatening rain.”

“All the more reason to get something hot and sweet. Come on, get your things, my treat.”

Peggy bemusedly complied, returning inside to grab her coat and purse. “Mr. Jarvis, could you have my other appointments all rescheduled?”

“Of course, Miss Carter.”

“JARVIS, you’ll let us know if anyone comes looking for us, right?” Stark called from the doorway.

“As always, sir. Should I notify your phone directly?”

“If it’s Pepper, yeah, if it’s not, send them to voicemail.”

“Of course.” The AI made no further comment as Peggy closed the door, the locks sealing as she followed Stark to the lifts. He called one with a flourish, eyeing his expensive watch briefly as he did so.

“I told Pepper I would make an appearance at the board meeting occurring in an hour, so I figure that gives me an hour-and-a-half to actually get there.”

Peggy snorted as the doors opened, allowing them in. “As opposed to actually being on time?”

“They don’t expect that out of me, it would throw everyone off their game. Honestly, those things are so boring, I don’t see how all of them aren’t late to it.”

“They have a sense of responsibility?” 

“I do too, that’s why I put Pepper in charge of it. Best thing I could have done. Things have stabilized tremendously under her leadership. We’ve sealed up the leaks of everyone selling things they shouldn’t, closed up Stane’s black market arms trading lines, and righted the ship financially. We had our biggest quarter in three years closing in December thanks in part to our new green energy initiative.”

“Good for you.” Peggy couldn’t help but think that a lot of that stabilization came thanks in part to the efforts of Natasha Romanoff working with Pepper Potts to help root out the rot that Obadiah Stane had instilled in Stark Industries, but she didn’t press her luck. Romanoff was still a sore spot with Stark. That she had been undercover for years right under his nose, for several weeks his personal assistant, rankled with the genius, in no small part because she had gotten one over on his rather keen intellect and prodigious ego - though it was not helped at all by the fact that his father had done the exact same thing seventy years prior.

“Have you been reading up on the project?” Stark was clearly preening as the doors opened to let them both out into the lobby of her building. He flashed his megawatt smile as several SHIELD employees wandering through to their own apartments stopped, staring at him like groupies as he wandered past.

“Uh...no.” Admittedly, she wasn’t even sure which project he was discussing. She perhaps should have been, considering that Stark was technically on the SHIELD payroll, but the last weeks had been consumed with everything else. She figured that if Stark was making no major headlines for being kidnapped or blowing something up, he was likely fine.

He looked vaguely hurt at that. “Come on, it’s been all over the place, my new energy initiative! I just won a big fight with the city on the power grid.”

Strange, Peggy mused as theys stepped into the damp outside, Julio hadn’t mentioned it. “Why are you picking fights over the power grid?”

“I’m taking Stark Tower off it.” He pulled out his sunglasses again now they were back out in cool, gray sunlight. He didn’t seem to be bothered by the rain as he led the way down the sidewalk. “You haven’t heard all about that?”

“I’ve sadly been a bit preoccupied. You mentioned something about that when I saw you last, yes?”

“Yep!” He popped the last sound of the word audibly. “Something I’ve been working on since I got back from my Afghan vacation, but I kicked it up a notch after discovering - well, rediscovering - badassium last year.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Peggy stopped dead in the sidewalk, unsure she heard him correctly or not.

Stark paused, turning to her with glee. “Badassium! I thought the name was brilliant. Pepper and Rhodey think I need to workshop it more, and so does my legal team who say I could never get it patented like that, but I think it has a certain _j’nai sais quoi_ , don’t you?”

“I am certainly speechless, that’s for sure.”

He shrugged, sighing. “We will probably name it something else boring, don’t worry. Legal is going for ‘starkium’.”

“I actually rather like that one,” Peggy argued, smiling fondly. “It reflects both you and your father’s work on it.”

“I guess,” he sighed, clearly disappointed by her lack of enthusiasm for his more vulgar idea. “Anyway, that core means that an arc reactor could run for lifetimes, really. The applications are huge, especially in terms of green and clean energy. Since I was already remodeling the Malibu house after...you know...throwing Rhodey through it, I decided I’d install an arc reactor power source there, take it off the SoCal Edison power grid. It worked so well, Pepper suggested we try it for the Stark Tower. We’ve been talking about doing an overhaul of the offices for years anyway, to make it more energy efficient, but we finally just went all in on it. We should be finishing it all up in the next month or so. If it works, I can begin testing this on bigger and bigger sites.”

For a city like New York, which had notorious blackouts even when she first lived there, the idea of a power source like that to help run homes and offices in a way that didn’t damage the environment - a concern of this modern world - should be a godsend. “Why is the city complaining so much, then?”

Stark shrugged, with the air of a man who considered those who didn’t understand his vision idiots. “Bureaucrats, if they don’t have five million environmental studies on the outcomes of what happens if you sneeze on it wrong, they don’t want to do it.”

“And so what was your fight?”

“They said they weren’t going to agree to use city manpower to install the reactor into the power grid. I said fine, they didn’t have to, I’d do it. Then there was some back and forth on that for a while, and then I asked if I could just buy the main line that fed the building. After a lot of legalese, the long and the short is I won and I’m installing it once renovation is complete in the next couple of months.”

Tony Stark was not a man who had many people say no to him and it showed. “I hope it works.”

“I’m sure it will,” he replied, filled with confidence. “Well...99% sure it will. I mean, it is built by me, so face it, it will work, but there is always some room for error.”

Through his chattering they had made it to the bakery in question, a slick, glass enclosed space, with pictures of baked goods hanging above glass domed cases filled with trays of pastries. The door opened to a cloud of warm air redolent with the scent of baking breads, butter and sugar. Peggy’s stomach growled audibly as they stepped inside, her cool cheeks warming as she made a beeline for the nearest case, expecting Stark to queue up at the back of the rather hefty line waiting to place their order. Instead he followed her, bypassing the line all together.

“Thought you’d like this place,” Stark mused, pleased that she was clearly drawn in.

Peggy was already calculating how many pastries she could get for Betty Ross, Dr. Young, and the medical team. “I think I need to take a box in for today.”

“Why not?” Stark shrugged, magnanimously, catching the eye of the young man working the counter, removing his sunglasses with flare as he shot him a toothy grin. “Hi there! So, I’m going to need two pain au chocolate, one of those to go, one espresso, whatever my friend here will want, and...I don’t know…” 

He stopped, counting the number of people walking in the door, then shot the man a calculating stare. “I’ll cover the orders of everyone who I just cut in front of...all my treat.”

The young man blinked, staring at Stark, recognition clearly kicking in. “You’re...you’re Tony Stark!”

“On some days, yes,” he nodded, glancing towards the line of confused patrons. “Guys, order whatever you want, breakfast is on me this morning!”

There was a chorus of happy expressions of gratitude at his announcement, which Stark soaked up like a sponge. Peggy left him to it, instead making her choices as the young man grabbed a box to fill Peggy’s order, setting aside one _pain au chocolat_ for her to eat along with the coffee she had ordered. Stark wandered up as her order was boxed, carrying his own white bag of pastries and a coffee, eyeing a table in the far corner.

“You made a lot of people happy this morning,” she teased as she eyed someone now ordering a large box of pastries for their office as well.

“Least I could do since I barged to the front of the line and made my order.”

Peggy suspected he rather enjoyed having moments like this, spreading his largesse and earning goodwill. Stark liked being loved, perhaps more than he liked being powerful. She supposed considering how Howard had been so distant with his own son, it was no small surprise he would seek affirmation and adoration from that quarter.

They settled at the table, Peggy taking off her coat to spread over her lap. Stark took out one of his pastries, setting the other aside carefully. 

“Peace offering,” he muttered, sipping from his coffee.

Peggy guessed he meant for Pepper Potts, who would be less than pleased at him showing up late.

“So, enough about me.” He took a sip of his coffee, eyes narrowing as he looked Peggy up and down. “You look like hell warmed over. JARVIS says you’ve been coming in late, not sleeping.”

Peggy glowered at him, already ready to pick this fight. “You are not seriously spying on me using your own AI butler to do it?”

“First, JARVIS is not a butler, he is an language enabled assistant, and second, it isn’t spying, it is looking out for a friend.”

Peggy glared at him. “Tell me, do you do the same to Miss Potts or Colonel Rhodes?”

He frowned, glaring at her as he bit into his flaky pastry. “Rhodey, no, only because he works for the military and I won’t put any of my tech near them for fear they will steal it.”

She noted he hadn’t denied he spied on Pepper. “It’s rude.”

“In fairness, I wasn’t spying so much as checking to see how JARVIS was performing in the new environment. Besides, it’s not like I’ve got cameras in there or anything, I just ask him how you are doing, like I would the cute girl who works for you...what’s her name again?”

“Agent Kam?” If the edge in Peggy’s tone was any sharper, he’d be bleeding.

“Her, yes! She’s smart, I liked her.”

“You are avoiding answering me.”

“Yes, I am, because I know that down that road leads a lecture in which I will be told I could have called and asked you and that using my AI to check in with you speaks to my habit of emotionally distancing everyone I know and let into my life.”

Well, Peggy decides, he wasn’t wrong. “You are going to continue to do it, aren’t you?”

He shrugged, chewing for a long moment. “Not if you ask nicely.”

“Please don’t do that any more. I’m entitled to my privacy, the same as you.”

“Fair,” he admitted, finishing off his pastry handly, wiping his fingers on a paper napkin. “I promise I won’t pry any more.”

She wasn’t sure she believed him, but decided she wasn’t in the mood to challenge his word.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Stark shot back, his expression cheeky as he threw back her own words at her. “How are you doing?”

“Fine!” The word floated up as automatically as breathing, even if it wasn’t completely true.

His keen, dark eyes narrowed, disbelieving. “How are things with Captain Popsicle?”

“Tony…”

He held up placating hands in front of himself, like a shield. “What, he was on ice and he’s red, white, and blue colored!”

Her glare didn’t subside, despite his best, contrite five-year-old expression.

“Come on, Peggy, it’s...a funny nicknames, quippy titles. It’s what I do!”

“You don’t even know Steve.”

“I feel like I do,” he grumbled, sipping at his tiny coffee, finishing the rest in a gulp.

“But you don’t, really. You know him from your father’s perceptions and from mine, nothing more. I don’t know, I just...wish you wouldn’t stoop to trite nicknames till you’ve at least gotten to know him more.”

She was being protective, she knew it, and clearly, he did too. He was apologetic as he sighed, realizing he had crossed a line. “I’m sorry. You are right. Let me rephrase that, how is Captain America doing?”

“Better,” she shrugged, pulling apart a bit of pastry, buttery and flakey, chocolate oozing from inside. “He’s physically healed from many of his injuries. Now it is just the waiting game of his brain waking up.”

She hadn’t seen Tony Stark since the moment she had received the call from Maria Hill that they had found him. He hadn’t known the full extent, so even that much earned a grave look from him. “I imagine that couldn’t have been pleasant.”

“No, it wasn’t.” She chewed on her pastry, automatically, registering the rich texture and sweetness but not really tasting it. “It would have killed anyone else automatically. That he is alive is more a testament to the serum. Anyway, he will come through most of it without issue, at least that is what Dr. Ross and the team working on him believe.”

“Ross? As in the general’s daughter?” That piqued his curiosity. “She got drug into this?”

“I needed an expert, she knows what she’s doing.” Peggy didn’t explain that she had practically begged the scientist to do it. “She’s asked to join the team on a periphery sort of way, for now at least, to keep up her work on the serum. She along with Jane Foster will be on board with you in terms of the science department.”

“I don’t do...teams.” His expression wrinkled in bland distaste.

Peggy was unmoved. “Good, as none of them are thrilled to be working with you, either, but I suppose you will all work it out.” 

He glowered at that, as if she were a school marm forcing him to do an assignment he didn’t like. “I had hoped I was done with group projects once I got out of elementary school.”

“No, sadly, not if you working with the Avengers.”

“Am I...working with the Avengers, that is? Word on the street is that project got canned and I was just on consult with SHIELD.”

Peggy pressed her lips together, wondering if she needed to have a discussion with JARVIS or not. “There are negotiations happening as we speak. Director Fury is in talks with the World Security Council. I believe he is in town today to do that very thing. I have a meeting with him later this morning.”

“I am sure that will fix everything," he muttered, his words dripping with sarcasm. "For the record, Gideon Malick is an ass. He’s still pissed I challenged him having a seat on the board at Stark Industries years ago. Not saying that has anything to do with it all, but I am sure it doesn’t help.”

Peggy hadn’t even been aware of that. “Why was he trying to get on SI’s board?”

“He’d pulled enough shares together to do it. The Malicks are old money, or as old as you get in modern day New York, they had invested with Dad years ago. He just finally got enough to feel he had a say. Stane and I pushed him out.”

Curious, Peggy considered, filing that away. “Well he is on the World Security Council and he’s making hell for the rest of us.”

“Yeah, he was a very Cold War, paranoid, ‘us-versus-them’ type. Ten years ago, he had a lot of traction with that shtick, worried about outside influences. I can’t tell if it is just low grade xenophobia with him or an excuse to gig up reasons for hyper-vigilance, he’s a bit slippery that way. Anyway, let me guess, he doesn’t like the idea because it is made up of people with awesome abilities who have minds of their own and he can’t control them. Banner, I imagine, is a nice scapegoat - big, green, angry, breaks things when mad. Your captain is hard to speak against without coming off as attacking a World War II vet and national treasure, but being that he is in a coma, they can sleazily point that out and remind you he isn’t awake and we don’t know how he will even react to all of this when he does. Romanoff is Russian and a spy, which automatically means untrustworthy, and as for me, I’m a narcissistic, self-centered, arrogant asshat who is little more than a vigilante in a weaponized, robot suit, a hot head who can’t be trusted with a water gun.”

One had to give credit to Tony Stark, he may not be particularly empathetic or aware of other people’s thoughts or feelings, but he was brilliant. Logic and reason where his realm, and he used both to easily suss that out.

“In a nutshell,” Peggy replied, before chewing on another bite of croissant. “Therein lies the problem. To make this work, to make all of you work, the powers that be will want some sort of authority, government oversight. The Avengers Initiative does that, it brings you all under SHIELD’s umbrella and has you in one place, with SHIELD and the World Security Council forced to provide oversight. Why there is a fight over this is a mystery to me.”

“You know what is a mystery to me? What is Fury up to and what isn’t he telling you?”

His words caught Peggy wrong footed, stunned by his non sequitur. All things considered, she had not spoken once to Stark about the various political issues surrounding the Avengers Initiative, its funding, its support, or the projects Peggy knew Fury was in charge of and were keeping deliberately from her on the World Security Council’s orders. Somehow, he had put all those pieces together on his own.”

“What makes you think Fury is keeping anything from me?”

He shrugged, indolently, scratching lightly at his goatee. “Why did he give you the Avengers?”

Peggy paused, thinking back to that now long ago conversation. “I was the one who broached it to him. I had just arrived, I was explaining to him why, he admitted the initiative was a project that he was working on. He gave it to me and asked me to put the Avengers together in exchange for finding Steve.”

“Funny that, you would think when told that Captain America is alive and findable in the Arctic that Fury would have been falling all over himself to send a team to search, anyway, but no, he put conditions on it, made you agree to run it.”

When put like that, it gave Peggy pause. “But I had mentioned it. Scott Lang told me that the Avengers were a team that needed to save the world.”

“Fair, but I am assuming in whatever timeline he came from someone put it together and it clearly wasn’t you. He came back in time to make you do it. So why did Fury give it up?”

She didn’t know. If she were honest with herself, it bothered her she didn’t know, and it bothered her that Fury had thrust it on her for other projects that he refused to discuss. They said it was because they didn’t trust her, which considering her entrance into this world was a fair statement, but also a convenient crutch. Two years in and they still said that, even after all the lengths she had gone to and efforts to prove herself credible?

“Fury is working on other projects the council deem more reliable, ones they don’t want me finding out about.”

Stark frowned, his gaze piercing as he calculated both her and the situation. “What is it that SHIELD would possibly be up to that they wouldn’t want you finding out about?”

As to that, Peggy couldn’t possibly imagine. “I don’t know. Probably something that they know I would object to on moral grounds should I find out about it. Perhaps something Howard had initiated years ago before his death, something he thought would help protect the world should there be a big enough threat.”

“And we all know how my father thought we could stop a big enough threat,” Tony drawled, pensive. “Not sure what he’s up to, but your Coulson has been chatty with Pepper and our science team of late. She says SHIELD engineers are discussing energy possibilities, but something isn’t adding up with that. I’m rather curious to fight out what they are.”

If Peggy admitted itself, so was she. After all, Coulson was in New Mexico with Barton and Selvig, clearly up to something. She couldn’t imagine that Coulson, of all people, up to anything nefarious, but stranger things had happened in her life. She pushed aside the remains of her _pain du chocolat_ , suddenly no longer hungry for it.

“You know, ever since Fury dropped that bombshell about Howard and SHIELD, I couldn’t figure it out. I always felt SHIELD was shady, I mean, after all, they are a spy organization, sort of goes with the territory. Why would he stick with an agency run by the likes of Fury? But in hindsight, I suppose Dad was a shady character himself, so it isn’t all that strange.”

“I founded that agency, too, you know,” Peggy shot back, irritated with the picture Stark was painting of the very group she had worked so hard to build. “You may not like the way global intelligence works, but there are a great many good men and women working in it that aren’t evil henchmen lurking in the shadows.”

For the briefest of moments, he looked duly chastened. “Fair point, and I do apologize for insulting your integrity and legacy with SHIELD. But I think that underscores my point. I agreed to all of this, to work with SHIELD, to join your Avengers club, not because of Fury, but because of you. I’m not interested in Fury’s agenda, or Malicks, or the World Security Council, frankly, I could do without all of them. But you...you showed up at my house, kicked my ass and told me to get over my damn self and fix my problem, and then stuck around till I did it. You believed in me. Hell, you barely even knew me outside of my stint in Afghanistan and my propensity for making an ass of myself in very public ways, but you showed up and stuck with me, no questions asked. I don’t know...you know, outside of Pepper, Rhodey, Happy, maybe my mother when she was alive, so few people actually believe that I’m just a good person. They just see the drugs, the drinking, the women, the parties, the very open bouts of stupid things done in and around all of those things. And when they aren’t talking about that, they like to call me the ‘merchant of death,’ which I own is a catchy nickname, but not precisely one you want to have engraved on your tombstone or written about in the history books. But no one thinks that Tony Stark can just be a good man. Maybe they think Iron Man can, I don’t know. You did. I said yes to this whole, crazy, bad Avenger’s scheme because you saw that in me, and I can guarantee that the reason anyone else joins its because they feel you saw something in them too.”

Peggy was so used to sarcasm and sly humor falling out of Tony Stark’s mouth, it took her a ridiculously long moment to realize that he had just said something profound and heartfelt instead. She was almost too surprise to feel touched...but she did feel that way. She hadn’t realized that the simple fact of pushing him to use his own intellect to save himself would mean that much to him.

“Thank you,” she managed, nearly choking around the sudden lump in her throat.

“I’m only calling it like I see it.” His diffident shrug belied his confession, as be focused on his agitated fingers tapping on the table. “Truth is, Peggy, you’re right. The world does need the likes of us, something beyond agendas and politics. I mean, that’s what you and Dad wanted SHIELD to be in the first place, right? Then, as Dad would say, fuck ‘em! Get out of there, take the Avengers, come to SI. I could set you up nice, get the whole team there, fix up the tower with spots. You can even bring Iceman with you. He’s old enough to remember what real heroes used to be like.”

“Tony,” Peggy sighed, half in warning, half stunned.

He rolled his eyes. “I promise, I will lay off.”

“Beyond that,” Peggy ignored his continued sarcasm around Steve. “SHIELD at least gives us authority...protection. It means the Avengers are accountable to the UN and not one country or one man.”

She knew he understood the optics of that and the implications. “I have no desire to take over the world. I can barely keep my own life together.”

“I know, but stop and think about it. The thing that people fear the most about the idea is that the Avengers are little more than vigilantes. Oversight by a group bigger than just you, Pepper, and Stark Industries board is what is needed. We need someone to hold the lot of you accountable, and for right now it is SHIELD.”

She was right, he knew she was right, and he didn’t like it. “Look, Peggy, I know SHIELD is your baby. But sometimes, kids...they don’t turn out how you thought they would. If there is anyone who understands that metaphor better, it is me. I don’t know what’s up, but if they are jerking you around with this, and by extension us, then maybe we need to rethink this strategy.”

It was a thought, an idea, though one Peggy was loath to lean into. For all that she despised the politics involving Pierce and Malick’s feud over this, SHIELD was the place for them all to be. After all, the entire idea was for global security, intelligence and logistics, and the Avengers would be at the heart of that. To take them out of it would be to leave them without the massive resources of SHIELD, and to leave SHIELD without perhaps their best weapon to do just what their mandate called them to do.

“Hey, yo, what’s up with this?” He frowned, jumping a bit as he reached inside his breast pocket for the device he called his phone now at days, a bit of metal and glass that looked more like someone had shoved a clear piece of thick film into a silver, gray base. It lit up as he flicked it, text scrolling down the screen. He flicked it again, and the text scrolled up, an illusion, like the projection from a film hovering up over the glass itself, continuing the message. It was the most advanced looking thing she had ever seen, and Peggy was far too amazed by it to attempt to read Stark’s message backwards, wondering how he even got the thing to work.

“Did you bring your phone with you?” Whatever he was reading it was cause for concern.

She had to stop and think, reaching for her purse as she did. “Oh...I don’t know. I don’t think so. I still forget to check for it half the time before I go out and it needed to recharge overnight.” Her 1940s brain often forgot her phone, mostly as it was still strange to her that she could just carry it with her wherever she was at.

“JARVIS says SHIELD is trying to get a hold of you, something urgent...a Code 13? That important?”

Quite suddenly the traffic and people outside of the plate glass windows, the quiet hum of voices and music inside, the cases of pastries, the smells and feel of the bakery, faded away to nothing more than a pinpoint. Fear, elation, worry, irritation, panic, and excitement all bubbled within her at once as she stared at Stark’s increasingly more alarmed expression. Almost on auto-pilot, she grabbed for her coat, her purse, and her bag of food, pushing away from the table like a shot.

“Hey, Peggy?” Stark grabbed her wrist before she could bolt, tethering her to the spot, shaking her out of her flight. “What’s going on?”

“Code 13...he’s awake. Steve’s awake. I...I need to get to him, to SHIELD HQ. I should have been there, so I could explain things…”

“Hey, hey, hey!” Stark’s voice gentled as he softly shook her arm, forcing her to look at him, for once the steady one. “We will get you there. I got my car parked over at your place. I’ll have JARVIS let the valet know to bring it around. I can get you over there in 15 minutes, give or take. SHIELD will keep him safe till you get there, all right?”

Peggy blinked at him, nodding, unsure of what to say. Words were nowhere to be found even as she grasped for them.

“Just walk with me, we will get you over there.”

“He’s awake!”

Stark’s expression softened. “I know. Come on, let’s get you out of here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am a Dodger fan, so that scene with the radio gets me every time.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peggy returns to SHIELD HQ and finds a situation.

To his credit, Stark did hustle her back to her building and his car, where the valet waited with a much more subdued Audi than she had expected. Time seemed to crawl as they got inside, Stark taking the wheel and effortlessly inserting himself into the flow of New York City’s infamous traffic. Peggy's emotional state was in utter chaos. Why she choose to be melting down now, who was to say? After all, this was a moment of joy, wasn’t it? This wasn’t like the day they came to the house and told her parents about Michael, a blow that had caught her out of the blue. Nor was it as horrific as the night that Colleen had died, shot in the head as she lay in bed while Peggy sat in the next room neutralizing the highly explosive nitramine. It wasn’t even the cold, emotionally numbing hours sitting in the communication center of Schmidt’s Austrian bunker, silent tears creeping down her face as she listened to the empty static on the other end, waiting for Steve to answer. This was a happy day, a joyous day...and she felt like she was falling apart. 

Logic didn’t seem to have a lot to do with it. Excitement, fear, worry, joy, and panic all coalesced at the same moment as it became clear to her that after six years - six years - he was alive once again. What must he be thinking? What did they say to him? He must be so confused, lost...did they even tell him about her? Would they even think to? Perhaps they were waiting till she arrived? He was alive, she could touch him, finally wrap her arms around him and never, ever let him go this time….except she might murder him for doing something as foolish and foolhardy as he did. Yes, he saved New York and countless other cities, but those bombs on Schmidt’s ship had still been live. Fate had kept them safe all these years, unexploded, so that they could find him. The merest chance and he could have been gone before anyone had the ability to find him. Why was he so determined to get himself killed? But he hadn’t...he was alive. She had to remember that, he was alive, this was real, and she was going to see him...and she was finally going to get that dance out of him.

Peggy’s brain raced, pinging off one idea to the next, like a pinball machine at Coney Island, whirling and spinning between new thoughts and ideas. Stark, blessedly, remained quiet, giving her space as he maneuvered himself through traffic with the ease of a race car driver. The distance between her building and the SHIELD headquarters by car wasn’t so great, seventeen blocks or so down 9th Street to 46th, but Peggy found herself counting every one as they seemed to hit every red light in the city. Perhaps she should have taken the time to race up to her flat and grab her phone. She could at the very least be getting the update from Cassandra on what was going on.

They finally managed to make it to headquarters, Stark for once simply pulling up across the street from the building’s front door, where what looked like a fleet of black, armored SUVs all sat in front of it, choking the flow of traffic up and down the already narrow street. He frowned, but simply pulled in front of a driveway leading elsewhere, bringing his car to a stop and turning towards her with worry. “You going to be okay?”

“Yeah,” she gasped, not sure that it was true. Still, she clung to that as she gathered her things, trying to look more put together than she felt. “I will be.”

“You sure, because if you need moral support I can be there. I can call Pepper. She’d understand.”

She had forgotten he was supposed to be at a board meeting. He was rather sweet about it. “Thank you, but you have someplace to be and I need to handle this one on my own.”

Stark simply nodded, unsure if she was really as alright as she claimed to be, but willing to let it go. “Can’t say I know what you are going through, but I know if it were me getting back someone I thought long dead...let's say you’re holding it together better than I would.”

“I don’t know about that.” She felt as if she was flying apart at the seams, frankly, ready to crumble into the seat if she didn’t get it together. “Thank you for breakfast and the talk. I will think about it, I promise...maybe after everything.”

“Right,” he smiled with polite reassurance. “You got bigger things to think of. I’ll check in on you later, you this time and not JARVIS. I promise.”

It was a mark of just how frazzled Peggy was that she didn’t even question that. “Thanks. I’ll let you know.”

She clambered out of his car, her purse and the box of pastries with her, numbly waiting till Stark pulled off once again to wend her way through the slow-moving traffic. The SHIELD vehicles had blocked off most of it, and she meandered past them. While people still walked in and out of the lobby doors, more security had been sprinkled throughout the lobby. One, standing just by the door, glared at her through his sunglasses till she fumbled for her badge, clumsily flashing it to him before he nodded and let her in. She hadn’t recognized him.

Peggy stepped inside, the lobby filled with its usual bustle. Nothing seemed terribly out of place here. There were no broken walls or injured agents scattered about. No one seemed to notice her particularly, save for the one lone agent standing in the middle of everything, obviously waiting for her. Cassandra spotted her immediately, rushing to her in a flurry of excitement, worry and straightforward duty.

“What happened,” Peggy barked before Cassandra even reached her.

“He ran off,” she replied, simply, her dark eyes as wide as saucers in her face. “It all happened so fast! He woke up, like people do, and he freaked out. I mean, obviously he would, waking up to a different world. He made for the door and was out like a shot. You weren’t kidding when you said how strong and fast he was.

Guilt spiked as Peggy glanced around, knowing all too well the damage Steve could do. “Was anyone hurt?”

Cassandra shook her head, her dark bun bobbing with the force of it. “No, the security on his detail was banged up a bit. Nothing major, just had the wind knocked out of them, bumps and bruises. One guy said it was like a freight train bowled him over and I don’t blame him. Rogers sent them flying.”

“Thank God he didn’t do worse.” She cursed herself, briefly, for running so late. “I should have been here.”

Cassandra’s response was to glare at her in a way Peggy suspected Cassandra’s own mother tended to do. “You couldn’t spend every moment of the day by his bedside. Besides, he’s fine now, he didn’t get any farther than Time Square before he stopped. Fury was en route at the time the code went out and his team happened to stop there and talk him down. He’s upstairs right now in Chief Braxton’s suite.”

He was fine...Peggy let out a small sigh of relief. “And Fury?”

“Waiting for you in the main conference room. You may want to see him first for a full update.”

Peggy only nodded, brain stuttering as she thought of what to do first. “The medical staff?”

“Are all fine, he didn’t hurt anyone who didn’t try to body check him. Clearly, that isn’t a good idea.”

A half-hysterical giggle bubbled up from within Peggy. “No...no it isn’t.”

Concern writ itself on Cassandra’s expression, as she reached a steadying hand out to Peggy. “You going to be okay?”

“Yeah,” Peggy assured her, not feeling that way.

“I get it, this is huge.” Cassandra shuffled, clearly wanting to be more supportive and unsure of the protocol. “Do you maybe need a minute.”

“No.” She shook her head, firmly. Underneath the turmoil of feelings the part of herself that had faced down bombs, bullets, and certain death began to pull the scattered pieces of herself together, reminding her who she was and how far she had come. She wasn’t ever the sort to fall apart over anything. With a steadying breath she glanced at the pastry box still clutched in her hands, shoving it towards Cassandra. “I got this for Dr. Young and her team. After today, I think they very much deserve it. I should take the entire lot of them out for dinner.”

Cassandra's face split with a wide, understanding grin. “I’m sure they will be grateful, they are a bit excited. Dr. Ross and Dr. Young, of course, want to get their hands on Captain Rogers as soon as he’s up for it, but I told them it would be a bit. Let him get acclimated to all of this first.”

“Thank you.” As always, Cassandra moved with the efficiency and quick thinking that had drawn Peggy to her in the first place. “I am going to go see Fury first, then...Captain Rogers.”

“I’ll be here if you need anything.” She reached out to squeeze Peggy’s arm in reassurance.

With that, Peggy went to find Fury.

The main conference room that the New York office had was on the top floor - near Chief Braxton’s office, Peggy knew. She could see the site chief himself in the room standing next to Fury’s imposing figure, clad as always in his dark clothing. Today, Fury had on a long, leather trench coat, similar to the one he had worn on the day she met him. She swept past the wall of glass panels that looked into the room and through the door, greeting both men, hurriedly. Braxton, for his part, looked relieved. Fury merely frowned at her with his one good eye as if to silently ask what took her so long.

“My apologies, gentleman, I was delayed this morning.”

“Hell of a morning to be delayed,” Fury replied, dryly, though not without humor. “Left your cell phone, I see?”

Peggy flushed, but neither confirmed nor denied it. “I was meeting with Stark.”

“Oh, yeah? And what did he have to say?”

Peggy met Fury’s curiosity evenly. “Nothing particularly flattering to Malick.” Or to Fury, either, but she decided to hold that piece to herself.

“Yeah, well, I was in town to meet with you and him about the Avengers, but change of plans.” He turned his head to Braxton. “You were able to clear things up with the NYPD?”

The head of the New York office, a man who many might have confused for Fury if he weren’t at least three inches shorter, wearing a gray suit, and lacking an eye patch, nodded at Fury’s barked question. “Had our team on it immediately. We told them it was an escaped suspect, the person was apprehended and left it at that. Honestly, it happened so fast the cops there didn’t even have time to react.”

Fury snorted, rolling his good eye. “Considering that they are protecting one of the busiest tourist attractions in the city from day-to-day, that gets me worried about the NYPDs response, honestly.”

Braxton shrugged. “If SHIELD is on it, they ask fewer questions.” He turned to Peggy, nodding his head in the direction of his offices. “I have Captain Rogers in the lounge area by my offices. I thought it would be quiet, give him some space. My assistant has been looking in on him, getting him whatever he needs.”

Peggy couldn’t help but let her gaze drift that way. Through the plate glass she couldn’t see the area. “How is he?”

Braxton glanced to Fury before shrugging his massive shoulders. “Like a man who woke up after 70 years.”

“I think we got it from here, Braxton.” That was Fury’s dismissal. The site chief nodded, giving Peggy a reassuring smile before departing. Peggy watched him go before turning back to Fury.

“How is he, really?”

“You ever read the story of Rip Van Winkle,” Fury asked, conversationally, leaning against the long table that sat in the middle of the room.

Peggy had, long ago. “The man who slept for decades to find the world had passed him by.”

“I think that’s about what Rogers is feeling right about now. Guy looked as if he had been dropped on another planet, not in the middle of Times Square.”

 _Oh Steve_ , she sighed, her eyes misting as she remembered her own reaction walking into this time. “It can be...overwhelming.”

“Yeah,” Fury agreed, his singular gaze pointed. “How are you holding up?”

She nearly laughed at that. “Better than I imagine he is.”

“Fair point. I wanted to discuss what we got before going to meet with Malick, see what Foster had turned up, if anything. I don’t know if it would make a difference if she did, but we don’t have the kind of time for her to find a needle in a haystack about your alien threat. I’m hoping to talk Malick off the ledge about bringing on the likes of Stark at the very least. I got Romanoff’s report on Banner. He’s a harder sell, but if we pitch it right, Malick might go for long term monitoring of the situation. He doesn’t have to know if we decide to approach Banner for his scientific acumen.”

Peggy was almost too rattled to wrap her head around this. “I suppose, given how hard he’s dug his heels in, do you think he will even go for that compromise?”

“Maybe...I don’t know. Captain America being awake and alive and here to help run the show might be persuasive. I can give it a shot.” He sighed, pushing himself up. “I had wanted to brainstorm this more, but I think for now I’m willing to compromise where I have to in order to at least keep these guys within reach at a moment's notice. The Avengers Initiative isn’t authorized or funded, but if we can pull them together that’s better than nothing. As you say, something big is happening. I don’t think we will be able to prove it to Malick before it’s in our faces. I’d rather be as ready as we can before it comes hurtling at us, whatever he says.”

Fury’s position wasn’t that different from Julio’s. There was no way that they could play the field of World Security Council politics to get Malick and the council to agree to fund the Avengers or support the initiative, at least not soon and, Peggy feared, not before they would need them. Best to get Malick to agree with the bare minimum and do what they could to make it happen anyway.

“And when we are faced with invasion and do have to call the Avengers?”

“We will deal with it all then and damn the consequences with Malick.”

Peggy nodded, considering her conversation with Stark. There were other forces at play, other things that Fury had kept secret. She wanted to ask, but...Steve was so achingly close...and she had waited long enough.

“I will handle the Security Council piece for now,” Fury pushed himself up, his dark scowl softening. “I want you to take some time off.”

She hadn’t expected that. “But…”

“Foster is down in Florida. Stark is busy doing whatever he is doing in that building of his. Malick, the council, all the rest of it can wait. Take the time, Carter. Two years in this future, you’ve not taken any for yourself.”

That wasn’t completely true, but it wasn’t far from accurate, either. “I can assure you…”

“You are kidding, right?” His dubious expression looked her up and down. “Kam told me you’ve been staying here by his bedside all hours. You actually sleep the last three weeks?”

How Cassandra knew that, Peggy didn’t know. She was torn by respect for colleague and irritation that everyone thought she was so delicate she couldn't stand a few sleepless nights. “I’m fine. I am hardly some fainting flower who can’t do her job in the face of turmoil and upheaval.”

“Didn’t say you were, but if I were you the last three months, I might be.”

Peggy highly doubted that, Fury was a long time soldier and operative. But, then again, what did she really know about him and his past?

“You know, I had always heard stories of Steve Rogers.” Fury pushed himself upwards, drawling softly as he moved past Peggy, hands shifting to his trouser pockets. “The greatest soldier of World War II, a man who took out whole squadrons of men with just his shield and wits. You hear things like that and you sort of laugh, because it’s the kind of tall tales they always tell you about a war. Few of them are true. Then I saw him in action today, and...maybe I believed them a bit more.”

When he came to the wall of glass, he paused, studying the distance...likely where Steve waited. “You know, if I were him, I’d have gone to ground, hid, tried to figure all of this out. But then, I’m paranoid and think everyone's out to get me. You know, then he finally stopped, the first thing out of his mouth was to ask what was going on. Once he wrapped his head around that, the very next thing he brought up was you.”

If Fury had shot her, Peggy didn’t think it would have ached so much as that statement. Her heart, her whole chest hurt. Breathing hurt. Tears blurred her vision. It was...she didn’t know, really. It was aching longing, yes, but it was also the knowledge that had she not been there. Had she never come forward in time with Scott Lang, he would have woken in the future without her.

“I didn’t tell him you were alive in this time.” Fury turned his profile to her. “I thought that you should have the right to tell him yourself.”

She sniffed, despite herself, taking a deep, steadying breath. “Thank you.”

“What can I say? Deep inside there is a sentimental romantic at heart. Though, if you tell anyone, I will deny it.”

Peggy snorted a wet chuckle.

Fury’s serious mien returned. “Take through next week, Carter. I don’t want to hear you’ve been in the office, and don’t think I won’t know. Kam will rat you out for me on a dime if you so much as step foot in this building or answer a single email. She can handle Foster and the rest till you get back.”

It was an order from a man whose authority over her in the hierarchy was ambiguous at best, but she had a feeling he wouldn’t hesitate to press the matter if she didn’t do as he asked.

“Besides,” he jerked his head towards the direction where Braxton’s office lay. “I have a feeling he will need to acclimate. You’ll be helping him out. I’ve had Coulson pulling up his old things and they should be here within 24 hours. They will be delivered to your apartment.”

Peggy could only nod, rather overwhelmed by all of it.

“In the meantime,” Fury drawled again, wandering away from the glass wall and back over to her. “There is a soldier down the hall who has been waiting 70 years for a date with you. I don’t think you should keep him waiting any longer.”

_I’m going to need a raincheck on that dance..._

“Right,” she sighed, softly, the word floating out of her, a breath really. She glanced up at Fury, unable to move or to breath.

“Go,” he ordered, gently, reaching a hand behind her to push her forward. With faltering steps she did, stumbling past the long table and chairs, back out the door, and towards Braxton’s office.

It was down the hallway on a floor filled with other executive level offices in the building. Peggy’s own was one tier down on purpose, she preferred it that way, and while she was rarely ever up on this level, she knew where to find the site director’s suite. The main office area itself opened into a reception space where his assistant sat, a lovely woman in her thirties, efficient and watchful. Peggy didn’t know her name, but she knew Peggy and greeted her kindly.

“Chief Braxton said that Captain Rogers is here?”

She smiled, nodding. “I’ve got him in the lounge area. I told him someone would be in to see him shortly. He has been quiet since they brought him in. I got him coffee and water. The chief is out for the rest of the afternoon and said to give you some privacy.”

“Thank you.” She tried to breath normally, to find her calm. This was Steve, after all, the same man she had met all those years ago at Camp Lehigh, the same man who she had spoken to in that cab in Brooklyn long ago, telling her he had never danced with anyone. The world may only know the superhero who managed to bowl over SHIELD agents an hour ago, but she knew the shy, quiet man who was so determined to prove himself, he wouldn’t let anyone tell him no.

Carefully, she made her way across the reception space to the glass and chrome partition that cut off the lounge area from the reception space. It was the formal place for Chief Braxton to meet with guests and others, filled with squashy, comfortable chairs and tables neatly covered with various reading materials. The space was modern but comfortable, from the artwork on the soft, cream walls to the pale, yellow lighting brightening the space on a drizzly, gray day. On the far right, the entire wall of windows looked out south towards midtown, and further still to downtown, a forest of buildings as far as the eye could see. She could pick out the familiar ones, the Empire State Building closest, but the Chrysler Building and Stark Tower further down.

Standing with his back to her, silhouetted against the gray light, was the achingly familiar form of Steve.

Her breath caught at the sight. Even from the back she would know him anywhere. He was dressed in the comfortable athletic wear that they preferred in this time, the lycra fabric stretched taut over his broad shoulders and down his slimmer torso. He had lost some weight, despite their best efforts to pump calories into him and aid his healing, but he seemed as fit as ever. He stood with his face away, unaware of her staring at him through the glass, her emotions scattering in a million pieces as she studied him, as if checking him against her memory of him from 1945. The way he stood so erect and still, as if he were on watch. The way feeble sunlight managed to gild the lighter top of his ash blonde hair.

Achingly slowly, she reached for the door, pulling it softly open, not even a hint of a whisper on the hinges as the glass opened enough to let her in. She let it close behind her, gently, holding it so it wouldn’t startle him. He hadn’t turned, hadn’t even given indication that he heard her. Peggy opened her mouth to say something, but found herself fumbling for words, wondering what she could even say.

In the end, she said the first coherent thing that she could pull up, the words falling out of her almost out of long habit.

“You’re late!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I saw everyone's wonderful reactions to the last chapter and I felt a bit like a director of a film here - I knew I ended this in a cliffhanger and I was cringing as I KNEW everyone would hate me that the big reunion is Wednesday. But it is. I do map these things out well ahead of time and that's where it was in the story, and there were a lot of feels writing out these next several chapters. So many feels!!!!


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Peggy gets her wish.

She had forgotten how fast Steve could actually move.

He whipped around as if stung, turning to her standing by the glass and chrome door. Now, facing her, Peggy lost whatever else she had planned to say, seeing him mobile at last, his dear face slack in disbelief, his eyes - how she had missed something as simple as being able to look him in the eye - wide with surprise, confusion, dismay, and anguish all at once. It was the latter that caught her. She wanted nothing more than to throw herself at him, to burst into tears, but it was the dismay and anguish that stopped her short.

That was all quickly followed by chilling fury as he pulled himself up to his full height, his thunderous expression glacially cold, the low rumble of his baritone voice more accusative than wonderstruck. “What is this?”

Peggy stumbled at that, drawing up short, startled into stillness. In a million years, this was not the reaction she had expected she would receive from him, that of icy anger. “I...Steve…”

His name only seemed to fuel his ire. “Who are you?”

She blinked, panicking, crushing disappointment threatening to swallow her where she stood. Not this, not after all this time. This couldn’t be what was happening. Amnesia? Did he not remember her? Fury said he had asked about her. She found herself stuttering. “Steve...you know me.”

That brought him short. Doubt flickered, and dare she say, hope as well? He stubbornly shook his head, a perplexed line forming between his brows. “What game are you trying to play?”

Game? She frowned, wondering what he meant. It took Peggy several long moments to piece together what was happening here, the reason so obvious that she should have known better and she hadn't. She of all people should have. Her own frazzled brain hadn’t thought to consider that Steve had just woken up in 2012, decades after his crash. In the face of that sort of news he would not be expecting any familiar face, let alone her face, to walk through the door to meet him. He likely thought that she was gone, dead, lost like the rest of the decades of his life.

“Steve,” she whispered, almost pleading. “It’s me! I’m me! Peggy Carter, the same woman you were on the radio with when you crashed that plane.”

If she had stabbed him in the heart she didn’t think he could look more pained or devastated. 

“That’s not possible,” he rasped out in a rough gasp.

“But here I am,” she insisted, blood roaring in her ears as she took a tentative step into the room. “I was on the radio with you in 1945. You told me you had to take a raincheck on that dance.”

He was still...so very still. Everything about his expression - the set of his shoulders, the way his fingers clenched at his side, the hard set of his jaw - was hurt and wary, confused by what was happening. But he listened as she continued, cautiously, moving into the room and around the furniture.

“You told me you had to put the plane in the water. Do you remember? I begged you not to, that I’d get Howard on the line, we’d figure out how to land it, but you were so bloody determined. You told me it was your choice. You threw my own words back at me, and you were right, and I hated it.”

She crept along the far edge of the seating area, all the way to the side Steve stood on. He watched her, uncertain, until she stopped, facing him, ten feet away.

“We planned a date. Do you remember? The Stork Club, 8 o’clock. I told you don’t be late. You wanted the band to play something slow. You were afraid to step on my toes.”

Much like that day so long ago, tears streaked, slowly, down Peggy’s cheeks, as she silently begged him to remember. “After that the line went dead. I waited...for hours for you to answer me. You didn’t.”

A thousand things seemed to flare to life on Steve’s face - anguish, longing, regret - but the one overriding emotion was hopeful disbelief. “Peggy?”

She sobbed, nodding. “Yes!”

Who moved first, she would never remember, and she wasn’t sure it mattered. At the slightest invitation, she threw herself at him, arms wrapping around his neck as she felt herself lifted up, off the floor, held so tightly it nearly crushed the life out of her. Peggy didn’t care. She buried her face in the crook of his neck, holding on just as tightly to him as he did her, swing her about with the force of it. She clung to him, not caring who saw her do it.

And then she went quite thoroughly and completely to pieces.

All these years...all the heartbreak, the longing, the regret for not protecting him more than she did, for letting him go too easily, for not demanding his coordinates or searching for him more diligently, all of that fell away in a wash of tears, her sobs aching as they ripped out of her, stealing her breath and tearing out of her throat. All the while he held her as if she weighed nothing, one armed wrapped around her middle, pinning her to him, the other running across her hair, soothing, as if she were the one who had woken up after seven decades, not him. He said little as he held her and let her come apart, a mess of anguish, grief, loss, relief, happiness, and everything in between, everything she had thought and felt since that awful day in 1945.

How long they stood there in their own private reunion, Peggy didn’t know. It could have been hours, though she doubted that. Her tears finally did subside, her aching, pained sobs finally quieting to little more than the occasional whimper and sniffle. She refused to let go, however, if anything she was clinging harder. God, he even smelled the same, which was insane to think about, but she didn’t care. He was alive, he was here, and she could hold him, physically sense him. There was nothing imaginary about this.

“It’s all right,” Steve finally murmured, softly, his fingers gentle in her hair. It was the sort of comforting statement one could expect in a situation where one person is falling apart, and she found herself giddily amused by it, thinking to herself that nothing was anywhere close to all right, nothing in the world. But this...this was one step better to being all right.

She finally pulled away, her face dewy and flushed. She was sure what remained of her cosmetics was a horrid, running mess, and poor Steve was covered in it. But she managed to pull back enough to look at him, up close, to study his face now open and awake. He looked no older than he had in 1945. For all that Peggy had fallen apart, Steve too looked not far behind her, eyes red and facedamp with tears. She released him enough to reach a hand up, cupping his cheek as she ran a thumb across, wiping away the dampness as he closed his long, dark lashes, forcing more tears down his face as he did.

“Look at the pair of us,” she whispered, sniffing as she smiled, her swollen face aching with it. “What a mess we make.”

He only stuttered a shaky laugh, leaning his forehead against hers, a shared moment of intimacy and connection, before leaning back and gently lowering her back to the ground. Her shoes touched the carpet and she settled on wobbly knees, still holding on as if afraid that he would disappear the moment she let go.

He finally did speak up, his voice hoarse with emotion. “How?”

Something hysterical bubbled out of her, as she bit back the desire to giggle until her sides ached at the absurdity of all of this. “It’s...utter madness, Steve, such utter madness.”

His own disbelieving laugh felt as brittle as hers. “Any more than crashing an airplane and waking up decades later in a whole new century?”

“Perhaps on par.” She shook her head, wondering even where to begin. Letting him go, finally, she wiped at her tears with the back of her hand, glancing around the space and finding several boxes of tissues about. She moved to grab the nearest one, pulling out several to mop up the worst of the mess, holding the box out to Steve. “I must look a sight right now.”

“You look beautiful,” he countered, with his achingly familiar, shy smile despite his own tear-swollen face. “The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“You always were a charmer, Rogers,” she chuckled, blowing her nose, rather inelegantly, she thought, before looking for her purse and the compact she knew was inside. She pulled it out, allowing Steve to pull himself together as she reviewed the damage. The streaks of mascara rubbed away easily enough, though she was afraid Steve’s shirt was stained with it. The rest of it held up remarkably well, all things considered. She frowned at her blotchy face and her now mussed hair, trying to repair the latter as best she could.

“Peggy, I’ve seen you after two weeks on patrol without a shower.” Steve shook his head, still clearly blinded by the fact she was even alive.

She snapped her compact closed, pulling back some of her poise as she slipped it into her purse. “You caused quite the stir today, Captain Rogers. Two SHIELD agents taken out like bowling pins?”

He at least had the grace to look somewhat ashamed for it. “Are they all right?”

“Bumps and bruises, mostly, and a story to tell their comrades.” She rounded the couch to sit, finally, her shaking nerves needing to collapse. She sank into the soft cushions, not realizing till that moment how taut every muscle in her body had been and how tired she now felt. “I can’t imagine you meant harm. After all, you had no idea what was even going on.”

“You can say that again.” He too found a chair near her, collapsing inside as he stretched his long legs before him. “One minute I’m talking to you, then...impact.”

That one word carried so much weight with it, it made her physically flinch.

“I don’t remember much after that,” he admitted, frowning as he clearly tried to think back. “Everything is a blur. Images, I suppose, dreams. I saw you in there.”

His cockeyed smile at least elicited a return one from her. “Perhaps it was after we found you. I was in the lab a lot...everyday, actually.”

“Maybe,” he murmured, shaking his head as if to clear it. “I came to in...I guess that was a hospital room. I didn’t know where I was, everything looked so strange and foreign. The first thought I had was HYDRA had captured me and I was in a bunker in Berlin. But then they had the Dodgers game playing and that threw me.”

“I wouldn’t have thought that it would,” she admitted, somewhat apologetically. “That was me, I thought...it would be something nice for you to hear while you were still recovering.”

He softened, rushing to assure her. “It was...it was great, just...it was a game from May, 1941. I was at that game, me and…”

He trailed off, crushing sadness rushing up in his expression once again. Peggy didn’t need to ask who he had gone to the game with, because of course it would have been Barnes. Her heart, which had already spent so much of the day aching, broken open anew for him.

“Anyway,” he continued, roughly, the pain of a wound that was still only days old for him, not decades, threaded through his voice. “I figured out something was wrong and tried to confront the nurses. I might have scared several of them.”

Likely, but they were SHIELD nurses. Peggy suspected they were made of tougher stuff. “Everyone is fine, Steve, I checked before I came in here.”

He only nodded his head, already lost in thought. “I didn’t have any idea what was going on. I made for the exit and was already down the street and in Times Square before I stopped. It hit me as I rounded the corner that I knew this place. Everything was in English, not German. The buildings were ones I remembered...well, at least some of them were. The signs...I mean I remember Times Square being loud and bright, but nothing like what’s out there now.”

“It’s overwhelming. It was to me, too.”

He simply nodded, quiet for a long moment. “Anyway, that’s when Commander Fury arrived and explained it.” He fell silent again, brow crinkling in thought as he pulled up words. “I mean, I got what he was saying, and it made sense, but...it was like some horrible nightmare. As if I had fallen asleep and woken up in some strange, insane universe.”

He turned his gaze to her with the familiar, piercing intensity she remembered. “And all I could think about was that I had a date with you and I missed it.”

Peggy refused to cry again. She wouldn't! But she did allow a small, heartbroken smile. “You did, I’m afraid. The Stork Club isn’t even there anymore, it hasn’t been for decades.”

He could only nod at that. What else could he say?

“I suppose,” he drawled after several long moments, “that we won the war, if New York is still standing and we aren’t all speaking German.”

“Yes,” she confirmed, momentarily caught at the fact that he would indeed have not known that. “The war ended weeks after you went down, as a matter of fact. Schmidt’s forces were neutralized before you even called in, but we were hunting down HYDRA and Nazi forces the entire rest of the war. By that point, Allied forces were closing in around Berlin and laying siege. Hitler killed himself before the Allies could breach the city. Just like that, the war in Europe was over. It took another four months to end the war in the Pacific.”

He listened, impassive, until she finished speaking. “What did it cost us?”

Peggy thought of the millions dead, of the bombs Howard worked on and the decades of uncertainty that caused. “A lot...there is...a lot that you will have to catch up on. But we won the war.”

She wanted to tell him that his sacrifice had not been in vain, that it meant something, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it, not when he was still processing the loss of decades of his life.

He cleared his throat, carefully. “I suppose after all this time that few of the guys are left.”

“Only one,” she confirmed. “Gabe is alive. He lives in Washington. He became a professor and an ambassador for a time. He’s now retired, a professor _emeritus_ from Howard University. I’ve spoken with him since getting back but haven’t visited. That is my fault, really, no excuse for it. Perhaps, now that you are here, we could see him.”

Steve nodded, clearly hearing her, but likely too overwhelmed to say yes or no. “The rest?”

“They all survived the war,” Peggy affirmed, knowing that was what he was asking. “Timothy took over command after you crashed.”

“Dugan?” That earned a burst of laughter, Steve frowning in amused disbelief. “They let Dugan be in charge of the unit?”

Peggy shrugged, bemused by it herself. “Phillips felt that as he was the next most senior member and the only one as mad as yourself, he had a right to it.”

Steve didn’t look as if he quite agreed with Phillips. “Why didn’t you take it? You should have.”

That had been Howard’s argument at the time, as well as Dugan’s. “I was an agent, not a soldier or commander. I had to run intelligence for them, because heaven knows Dugan couldn’t. Besides, we both know what the Army would have said. I might as well have been in charge, anyway, at least for the time I was with them. We spent our time hunting down the last of HYDRA’s high command. After that, I got reassigned to New York. They stayed on in Eastern Europe for a few years, following HYDRA leads. When Howard and I formed SHIELD, I transferred them over. Gabe was the only one who bowed out. He went back to school, but the rest stayed. As far as I know, they all lived happy, long lives.”

“You founded this place?” He waved an expansive hand, lazily circling the room, but Peggy knew he meant the entity known as SHIELD.

Again, she had to remind herself he wouldn’t have known that, either. “Well, with Howard and Phillips, yes. That was a long time ago.”

He looked quietly stunned and rather impressed. “Still...I shouldn’t be surprised. Personally, you should have been running the entire goddamn army as far as I was concerned.”

She flushed, recognizing the starry eyed look he had shot her so many times across the war room. “It wasn’t an overnight thing. I spent quite some time working in the SSR before everything changed. Howard and I had discussed it off and on for years, and when we approached Phillips, the timing was right.”

For her that had only been a scant few years ago. For everyone else, decades. What she and Howard had imagined now was a sprawling, complex beast. To think she had even the smallest hand in forming it was mind boggling when she stopped and thought about it.

“Peggy,” Steve’s sad, somber tone caught her out of her reverie. “Please tell me that whatever happened, however you got here, you haven’t been waiting to find me again this whole time.”

Good lord, she sighed, determinedly ignoring the stinging in her eyes. She loved this man dearly!

“No,” she assured him with a soft smile. “No, it’s only been six years for me, four years then and two years now.”

He seemed relieved to hear that. “And how…”

“That is a story involving a strange man named Scott Lang, time machines, Howard’s son, and something called the Avengers. As I said, Steve, it is all a mad story, and I promise I will tell you all of it, but...later. Honestly, you’ve had a lot thrown at you in just the last hour.”

“What’s one more crazy thing? You could tell me the sky is purple and I’d believe you right now.”

Oh, she knew that feeling so well.

“You will get used to it,” she replied, realizing how true that statement was. She had thought the world upside down herself when she arrived and now she was using computers and cellular phones...when she remembered them and didn’t leave them at home, that is.

He cast a wary glance out of the window. “At least not everything in the skyline is different. The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building at least are still there.”

Steve, the eternal optimist.

“You’ll find there are a lot of things that are still here...and a lot of new and amazing things too. And I’ll show it to you, I promise.”

He turned back to her with a wistful expression. “I thought I was the one who was supposed to show you around the city.”

They had talked about that so long ago, while strolling around London, Peggy pointed out the sites to him. How she had wanted him to be there in those early days when she had officially resettled in New York, to show her his favorite spots and to take her to his favorite places. Now so much of it was gone, washed away in decades of urban decay, renewal and change.

“You were...you are. You are here now, and you made me a promise, Captain Rogers. I am holding you to it.”

How easily they fell into their old routine. There again was that look he always used to give her, the playful half smile tugging at his full mouth as he watched her through his dark, full lashes. Peggy felt her heart skip a beat as he lazily sketched a salute.

“Yes, ma’am, Agent Carter.”

She didn’t bother correcting him. She didn’t want to. She wanted to hold this moment for as long as she could, this achingly familiar moment between them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As hard as it has been for you all to wait...it has been for me as well. So I'm very glad it is Wednesday and you all got this.


End file.
